The Great Divorce is a novel by the British author C. S. Lewis, published in 1945, based on a theological dream vision of his in which he reflects on the Christian conceptions of Heaven and Hell.
The narrator inexplicably finds himself in a grim and joyless city, the "grey town", where it rains continuously, even indoors, which is either Hell or Purgatory depending on whether or not one stays there.
The ascending bus breaks out of the rain clouds into a clear, pre-dawn sky, and as it rises its occupants' bodies change from being normal and solid into being transparent, faint, and vapor-like.
(One of the earlier ghosts, the narrator learns with a start, had committed suicide by throwing himself under a train, whereas one of the final spirits had died peacefully in bed in a nursing home.)
Much of the interest of the book lies in the recognition it awakens of the plausibility and familiarity–and the thinness and self-deception–of the excuses which the ghosts ultimately refuse to abandon, even though to do so would bring them to "reality" and "joy forevermore".
[2] A former bishop refuses, having grown so used to framing his faith in abstract, pseudo-intellectual terms that he can no longer definitively say whether he believes in God; an artist refuses, arguing that he must preserve the reputation of his school of painting; a bitter cynic predicts that Heaven is a trick; a bully ("Big Man") is offended that people he believes beneath him are there; a nagging wife is angry that she will not be allowed to dominate her husband in Heaven.
This is most grossly and strikingly illustrated in an encounter of a blessed woman who had come to meet her husband: She is surrounded by gleaming attendants whilst he shrinks down to invisibility as he uses a collared tragedian who is chained to him—representative of his persistent use of the self-punishing emotional blackmail of others—to speak for him.
An inconclusive dialogue about the unfathomable mysteries of eschatology and soteriology ensues in which the visions of Swedenbourg and Hildegard of Bingen, the crux of the matter being eternity vis-à-vis time.
The (metaphysical) use of chess imagery as well as the correspondence of dream elements to aspects of the narrator's waking life is reminiscent of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Philadelphia playwright and actor Anthony Lawton's original adaptation of The Great Divorce has been staged several times by Lantern Theater Company, including a weeklong run in February 2012.
[6] Lauded by the New York Times for its imagination, theatrical skill and daring, theatre critic Neil Genzlinger called the production thought provoking "with plenty to say to those interested in matters of the spirit."