By Larry E. Fink

I’m gonna shake God’s hand
Thank Him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I’m gonna get a guitar
And start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel
Ain’t the afterlife grand?

                                       –from “When I Get to Heaven,” by singer-songwriter John Prine (1946-2020)

People imagine many different things about heaven, including C.S. Lewis, one of the most imaginative Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. The Narnia books include lots of brief hints about “Aslan’s Country,” but his adult fantasy novel, The Great Divorce (1946) contains his most fully developed musings about the afterlife. As with his Screwtape Letters, Lewis makes it plain in the book’s preface that he is not trying to tell the reader what the next world is like: “I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course–or I have intended it to have–a moral. But the trans-mortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may await us.”

In an essay on Screwtape (reading the devil’s mail), I described that work as an “epistolary fantasy novel”—a story told entirely in letters from one person to another; and a fantasy, because the letters are written by one fallen angel to another. Because of its structure, The Great Divorce (1946) might be called a “vision,” something like some of the visions recounted in the Bible, but more whimsical. For instance, characters take a bus ride to the border of heaven and can choose to stay or take the bus back where they came from after visiting with people they knew on this side of the grave. You’re wondering, “Why would they choose to go back?! Ah! That’s for you to find out. 

Before going any further, there’s the book’s title. Perhaps you’ve seen enough divorces to not want to read about another, no matter how “great” it might be. Let me just say, there are no mockingbirds killed in To Kill a Mockingbird, Gatsby is not that great a guy, and no couples divorce in The Great Divorce.    

So, why should you read it? As fantasy, it is a small masterpiece, transporting the willing reader into another realm of experience thanks to some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all of Lewis’ books. The rolling plains within sight of the mountains of heaven are lush and green, crossed by clear streams running from fields of flowers into quiet forests and out again. Such descriptions can be traced all the way back to Lewis’ childhood experience of his brother’s bringing into the house a cookie tin lid covered with “moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. . . . It made me aware of nature . . . as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. . . . As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.” 

And then, there’s the confrontations with spiritual wisdom and the experience of conviction you might share with more than one character, as I did each time I re-read the book with students. And lastly, if you’ve ever wondered what lies behind Lewis’ spiritual depth, there is a strong autobiographical side to this book. He introduces us to his personal spiritual mentor, his “master.” He refers to this man as his “Teacher”—with an upper-case “T”: the Scottish preacher, novelist, poet, and father of the modern fantasy novel, George MacDonald (1824-1905). In The Great Divorce, MacDonald is a major character. A very Lewis-like bus rider is met by MacDonald, and Lewis the author has MacDonald the character deliver some of the most profound statements in the novel. Apparently, Lewis thought it would be good for people to read a little MacDonald every day because he chose and arranged 365 quotations from MacDonald’s books and published them under the title George MacDonald: An Anthology, in 1946. It’s been in print ever since. In his 13-page preface to the anthology Lewis says the following about the impact of the first book he read by MacDonald, at the age of about 16: “What it actually did was to convert, even to baptize . . . my imagination.” And of another book by MacDonald–Unspoken Sermons— he writes, “My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help–sometimes indispensable help towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith.” 

So, to summarize, The Great Divorce is a brief (125 pages) imaginative romp, it’s a fascinating look into Lewis’ spiritual life, and it’s a serious call to self-examination in the light of eternal implications. You may see yourself more than once in the book. And it may hurt. It is many readers’ favorite Lewis book, probably because it offers beauty, healing, and hope. 

While everlasting ages roll,
Eternal love shall feast their soul,
And scenes of bliss, for ever new,
Rise in succession to their view.

                                                            –from “On Zion’s Glorious Summit” John Kent (1766-1843)

Dr. Larry E. Fink is a retired professor of English at Hardin-Simmons University