Thursday 12 January 2017

Roaming The Universe

(The Boroughs, Northampton, 1965.)

Are dead souls free to roam the universe? I doubt their existence, let alone their mobility. However, speculative fiction about the hereafter can both delight and enlighten.

In CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, the dead can:

remain in the grey town that will turn out to have been Hell;
take the bus to the foothills of Heaven, then climb into the mountains;
haunt libraries to see if their books are still being read;
bother those women we call mediums.

Hell, Heaven or Earth: fairly comprehensive.

In Alan Moore's Jerusalem, the Dead Dead Gang:

have amazing adventures, adding time to their directions of movement;
give each adventure a title like an episode of a series;
in 1645, watch Cromwell writing a letter to his wife on the eve of the Battle of Naseby;
in 2025, eavesdrop on a black woman berating a Council Department on her mobile -

- the supernatural, the historical, the mundane and everything between. We join them in imagination and reflect on life along the way.

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