The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

by Will Storr

‘The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherently unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group,’ writes the primatologist Professor Frans de Waal. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because a gang of low-status males has conspired against them. Precisely these patterns of status play haunt human lives and stories. The story theorist Christopher Booker writes of an archetypal narrative form in which low-ranking characters ‘below the line’ conspire to topple the corrupt and dominating powers above it. ‘The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level,’ he writes. ‘It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world