The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [250]
His story unfolds, like so many, through three main stages. The first begins when he learns by heart the Latin New Testament and a book on the Papacy ('he believed one as little as the other'). Armed with this trick, he takes his first step into the world outside his home by becoming tutor to the children of the mayor of the town, M. Renal. He at once wins the admiration of all by reciting chunks of the New Testament, a trick he shortly repeats at a dinner of local notables. He also, with his `almost girlish good looks', wins the heart of the mayor's wife Mme Renal, and they begin an affair.
An affair with a married woman, an older woman, or in this case both, is always a danger sign in a story. It invariably shows us that the hero is caught in a tie to `Mother, in a state of arrested inner development: and in Sorel's case it echoes the fact that he has no real `Mother' in the story at all. Mme Renal fills this gap. But of course their affair cannot lead to any `happy ending, and when it begins to attract embarrassing attention, Sorel heartlessly throws her over.
He now moves onto the second stage of his climb up the social ladder, as he leaves town for a seminary in the provincial capital, Besancon. `So here's this hell on earth from which I'll never be able to get out' is Sorel's greeting to the seminary: `according to the rules of conduct he had drawn up for himself, he looked on his three hundred and twenty fellow students as enemies'. The young man is now more egocentric and heartless than ever, seeing his contemporaries only in terms of rivalry and domination. Eventually Sorel wangles an invitation to dinner with the bishop, a worldly prince of the Church, visiting from Paris. Inevitably he wheels on his party trick, by reciting lengthy passages from Horace. The bishop is impressed, and shortly afterwards Sorel obtains an opening beyond his wildest dreams, to travel to Paris to become secretary to `the most powerful man in France', the fabulously rich Marquis de la Mole.
The third stage begins with the gauche young provincial arriving in Paris, and making one or two silly social gaffes amid his magnificent new surroundings. But naturally he soon redeems himself by impressing everyone at dinner with a recital of Horace. He has already been struck by the beauty of the daughter of the house, Mathilde, `a young woman with the palest golden hair and a shapely figure'. The Marquis, as a kindly `Father, entrusts him with ever more important and confidential business. He is admitted to the ranks of the most fashionable young men in Paris (there are even whispers that he is `the natural son of a duke'). Above all, he wins the adoration of Mathilde who, needless to say, has herself now become `the most admired young woman in Paris'. But the manner in which Sorel wins her love is portrayed only in terms of egocentric domination and subjection: `you are my master', she tells him, `reign over me forever, punish your slave severely whenever she seeks to rebel'. She becomes pregnant and the couple decide to elope; but the Marquis relents and agrees to settle on them a huge income. It seems all is set for a sickly and pasteboard `happy ending, with Sorel united to his `infantile anima' and destined to `succeed to the kingdom' as the chosen heir to the Marquis's empire. Then suddenly, out of Sorel's past, disaster strikes. Mme Renal, his discarded mistress, writes a letter to the Marquis, blackening Sorel's character unmercifully. Enraged and frustrated, Sorel returns to his home town and attempts to shoot the vengeful `Dark Mother; Mme Renal, in church. Inevitably he is arrested and sent to the guillotine. The story ends with an extraordinary funeral ceremony, celebrated by 20 priests in a cave high up in the mountains, `lit by countless candles'. A sorrowing Mathilde buries Sorel's severed head. Three days later Mme Renal dies of grief.
The first thing which may strike us about this story is