The Great Divorce

I found this book very frustrating during the first few chapters. Because the author does not explain where the principle character is or where he is going on the omnibus, I found myself in dismay when the character glances out the window of the bus and casually says, "The bus has left ground." What? How did the bus leave ground? And how do houses just appear into existence at the thought of some town resident?

Eventually of course, it is revealed that the grey town was Hell, and the destination of the bus that the character is on is Heaven. That solved most of the frustration. The last bit was the result of the paragraph marks seperating the same character's part in the conversation. For example, typically in a typed conversation, each character's part of the conversation makes up a paragraph, which has its first line indented. In The Great Divorce, sometimes characters will speak a bit, and then speak a little bit more, spanning two paragraphs, each paragraph only one line long. Yet no metatext explains who is speaking. It takes a lot of context figuring to see that it is actually the same character speaking twice rather than the two characters switch turns.

Despite the frustration, there were many great truths into the Gospel of Jesus Christ that are "revealed" in the book. I say revealed, not that C. S. Lewis taught the principles for the first time they have been taught, but because he has a knack for taking truths we have always known in our subconcious, and putting them in just a simple way that it is as if we realize them for the first time.

My favorite example of this is quoted briefly below. It is the exchange of the principle character and his Teacher, a spirit from Heaven who is explaining how he still has a chance to leave Hell permanently. The character wonders at how he just happened to get on the bus that came here and found this out. And he is concerned about the others in Hell who never happen to try out that bus.

`But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?'
`Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.'

- The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis. Chapter 9