I’ve been a C.S. Lewis fan since my early tween years (and I’ll just say that I didn’t only read The Chronicles of Narnia then). But I just couldn’t get to this book. I’m sorry, Clive Staples, but I just couldn’t enjoy this book as much as I expected.

The story is simple enough: a man gets on a bus that takes him to “the other side”. There, he learns about the real difference between Hell and Heaven (basically, Heaven is a place where you’re close to God and Hell is where you are when there is no God). I don’t need to tell you that this book is very preachy. And I mean it. It’s a little allegorical, so you’ll have to give the whole book a few thoughts. It’s not the kind of light-reading book you usually get, and is very dense with religious and philosophical stuff. Those were the parts I was dying to skip, but couldn’t because I was reading this for a class (I’m still not really sure about why this was in the class, but I won’t ask the professor about that).

I did enjoy the myriad of literary references that are throughout the book. There’s a very easy take on The Divine Comedy, though Lewis was nicer than Dante and didn’t send any of his enemies to hell. The Virgil figure here is George MacDonald, a fantasy writer, who speaks with a very thick Scottish accent. It is him who leads the narrator and explains how the whole afterlife works.

Of course, there are a lot of moments when we see what the sort of good behavior that can lead you to heaven is: when you’re selfless, when you recognize your flaws and ask for help and so on. There’s a moment that annoyed me a little, when a mother is asking to see her son and they tell her that she can’t do so until she lets go. We’re supposed to see this poor mother as a selfish woman who cares more about her happiness than for her son’s. It made me raise an eyebrow, because she was one of the characters with which I related the most. And I’m counting the narrator here.

I actually like the idea of afterlife Lewis presents here. I’ve never liked the idea that we’re heaven or hell bound. I think there’s the possibility of redemption for everyone and I actually liked that Lewis showed it in that light. After all, we all deserve a chance. However, the preachy and too holy tone of the book annoyed me a little, so I was a little tired of the whole thing by the end of it.

If you ask me my honest opinion, I’d say that this book isn’t bad at all. But there are better books by Mr. Lewis. Just go and get The Screwtape Letters, which is so much better and a lot funnier. You can give The Great Divorce a miss if you have other things to read.