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The Great Divorce
History & Schools of Thought, Modern, Philosophy, Politics & Social Sciences Western
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis again employs his formidable talent for fable and allegory. The writer finds himself in Hell boarding a bus bound for Heaven. The amazing opportunity is that anyone who wants to stay in Heaven, can. This is a starting point for an extraordinary meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment. Lewis’s revolutionary idea is the discovery that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside. Using his extraordinary descriptive powers, Lewis’s The Great Divorce will change the way we think about good and evil.
- Release Date
- 1945
- Publisher
- Geoffrey Bles
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Our Review
About the book
A narrator boards a bus from a gray, dreary town and arrives at the outskirts of Heaven, where ghostly visitors are invited to stay if they will let go of what binds them. C. S. Lewis uses this dream-vision to explore choice, pride and the nature of Heaven and Hell.
Our review
Lewis imagines a day trip from Hell to Heaven, and most of the passengers would rather go home.
Short, strange and quietly devastating, The Great Divorce is Lewis at his most imaginative. The premise is a fantasy bus ride, but the real action is a series of conversations between ghostly visitors and the solid, radiant people sent to meet them. Each ghost clings to something: a grievance, a reputation, a possessive love dressed as devotion. Lewis has a gift for making these failures recognizably ordinary, which is precisely what makes them unsettling.
Readers should know this is a theological fable rather than a plot-driven novel; the episodes are vignettes, and the guide figure delivers more than a few sermons. Lewis also states plainly that he is not offering a literal picture of the afterlife, and the book is best read as moral psychology. Taken that way, its insight into how people choose their own misery feels as sharp now as it did in 1945.
What we loved
- Vivid, eerie imagery of a Heaven more real than its visitors
- Episodes that expose everyday self-deception with precision
- Compact enough to read in one sitting
Keep in mind
- Episodic structure with little narrative momentum
- The didactic passages can feel heavy-handed to non-Christian readers
Read it if you like
readers of The Screwtape Letters, fans of Dante’s Divine Comedy, readers of Pilgrim’s Progress
The verdict
A brief, brilliant fable about the choices that keep us small; essential Lewis.
