C.S. Lewis had a knack of titling his works with either extreme modesty or with seemingly unrelated terms. This is the case with "The Great Divorce," which sounds like a romance novel, but is meant to reveal the separate nature of the two realms of Heaven and Hell, yet speaks very little to the actual content of the work.

The short fictional piece is a fantastic journey through, what at first could be taken as any dreary British town, complete with gray architecture and quarreling citizens. Until the point when the bus on which these citizens are riding is lifted off the ground, the reader may take the setting to be home. The setting is definitely not home, but the personalities are the same. The characters throughout are used as a way to illustrate good and bad behavior and that which would get you in to the grand and beautiful Heaven or leave you in the small, pointless, and gray Hell.

Lewis is entertaining and thoughtful and once again comes up with brilliant points about human nature and the moral law, including Christianity (though this is but a subtle underlying theme). One interesting point Lewis makes that people will relate to is that given the clear choice between going to Heaven or Hell based on their beliefs, people will insist on maintaining their irrational beliefs and actually choose a pointless and brutal, yet familiar, Hell.

This is a great one-day read and part of a collection of Lewis' work that cannot be overestimated.

- JSB Morse