I've never read
The Neverending Story; it seems like it might be a little long.....
Sorry, bad pun.
Anyway, I was struck by a few particular similarities between Niggle's Parish and the plain that leads to the Mountains in
The Great Divorce.
There is the effect of
distance. What does distance say about paradise? It seems like it's associated with desire somehow, but Niggle had a kind of numinous experience from just perceiving distance. In mundane life, distant things are magical to us, and so we close the distance to get near them, but when we have gotten to them, they have lost their magic; Niggle's experience is that distant things retain their magic even in proximity. What does that mean?
The Tree in JRRT and the people from the Mountains in CSL are depicted as having a wholeness, which is very much at odds with the way they are remembered. The Tree in JRRT is unfinished and sketchy, but in Niggle's Parish it is all there as Niggle imagined it, but even better. The people in CSL are whole whereas, to listen to the ghosts who have just arrived on the bus, they were failures, sinners, murderers, and so forth. They're transformed, which in most cases comes as a disgusting shock and scandal to the ghosts.
How does
Neverending Story compare? Or other stories of paradise?