Monday 26 January 2015

Little book. Big subject

The biggest subject of all in fact - What happens when we die. The Great Divorce, a book I happened upon recently, is nothing to do with marriage, but the title is an allusion to Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. The author boards a bus that takes him, and a group of selfish, shortsighted, argumentative passengers, out of a grey drab city, so like the real life of late wartime, to a beautiful landscape where it is always dawn, but grass and water are solid, whereas the passengers  own bodies becoming transparent, ghostly. Here big healthy transfigured people, more physical than ever they were on earth, point out it is time to choose- Heaven, unfamiliar and daunting but ultimately more rewarding, or Hell in the endless city below. Some stay, some wait for the bus to take them back. A beautiful story that comes from the same time as a Matter of Life and Death (late in World War 2 when so many had been killed) and envisions the 'beyond' in something like the same way. There are hints at some of the imagery that would come out, later, in Narnia. A gripping read. If you only read one of Lewis's religious books, make it this one.
There is also a family connection. Lewis was a fellow of Magdalen College. For most of the war another fellow's sister in law Barbara had been living near Oxford with her two little girls - and Barbara typed out this book. She was well practiced because she had written several novels herself. And Barbara was my grandmother...