Celestia Déjà Vu

Robert B. MacIntyre is head of the Centre for Relationship Therapy and
Education in Orangeville, Ontario.

Margaret Duguid has written a fantasy of an afterlife that looks a lot
like an idealized continuation of a snowbird retirement. Her newly dead
souls congregate around hot springs or head south in search of warmth.
Their attempts to visit still-living family are unsatisfying and brief.
With the help of other souls—“angels”—from the celestial
spheres, Duguid’s protagonists begin a process of purification that
sounds remarkably like a high-powered health-spa makeover. Eventually,
they find the strength to fly to their homes in paradise, where the
savings accounts they had established before their present life on Earth
have been paying the upkeep on their suburban houses, and where they all
find satisfying jobs. The greatest evil seems to be marrying the wrong
person while on Earth, but eventually true “soul mates” are
reunited.

Duguid’s writing is somewhat stilted and repetitious. Her characters
are inadequately differentiated and exhibit little psychological
development in spite of all the physical changes they undergo. The
book’s underlying theology is a pseudo-Christianity, its politically
correct co-creators “God” and “Godwyna” notwithstanding. Real
evil isn’t a factor in this generally pleasant fantasy, which succeeds
in demonstrating the conventional wisdom that, for many writers, hell is
a more promising topic than heaven.