C. S. LEWIS: The Great Divorce

C.S. Lewis’s dazzling allegory about heaven and hell and the chasm fixed between them, is one of his most brilliantly imaginative tales, as he takes issue with the ideas in William Blakes’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a dream, the narrator finds himself in the grey limbo of Hell, where the disgruntled and ghostly inhabitants take a bus-ride to the plains of Heaven, where they meet angels and the souls of those already in Heaven. This striking fable portrays Hell as small and shrunken, less substantial than Heaven, which is bright and solid and the ultimate Reality. The occupants of Hell can never become part of Heaven, for their spiritual blindness prevents them from entering into its glorious reality. They prefer their own shrunken version of reality, to the joy which could be theirs. This powerful, exquisitely written fantasy is one of C.S. Lewis’s most enduring works.