Word: hell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...easily won. Our sportswriter turned out to be not so friendly; he thrashed us soundly in his story the next day. Feeling betrayed, we cursed our fair-weather friend. As George Allen said to the Washington sports press, "sometimes I wonder if you guys are really for us." To hell with objectivity. My eyes were opened that...
Thus British Historian E.E.Y. Hales sets the stage for an engaging theological fantasy that would have done credit to the late Anglican author C.S. Lewis. Like Lewis' Great Divorce and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan section of Man and Superman, Chariot of Fire suggests that hell is what one makes of it -and so is heaven...
Brock is not about to take hell lying down. Before falling completely into his rut, the ex-railroader busies himself with refurbishing the Limbo Line, a rickety train that runs from the First to the Fourth Circle of Hell - home of the avaricious. He is swiftly drawn into infernal politics. Cleopatra, the Second Circle's reigning queen, wants to rule all upper hell. Sister Martha, a heavenly busybody who wants to liberate souls from Limbo, will not hear of this. Satan, naturally, is enraged by Cleopatra's ambition...
Town Dump. All of this would seem preposterous if Author Hales did not charm the reader with the earthiness of his hell. There are no fork-wielding demons and no brimstone. It is only in the town dump that "the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not." Though Hales draws many of his characters from Dante's subterranean aristocracy, he sketches them with fresh wit. Cleopatra, for instance, has something of an American accent because she has been "surrounded, for the last hundred years at least, more by Americans than British...
Brock is not irrevocably lost. His shrewd shuttle diplomacy in hell puts him in a unique position to demand a reward. To reveal what that is would spoil the reader's fun, but the prize under lines the irony of the sign that greeted him in the Second Circle: "Hell is where you are free to be yourself, and nothing but yourself." Mayo Mohs