The story of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce begins in the Grey Town.
Published in 1945, The Great Divorce is a short theological fantasy narrated by a passenger who boards a bus from a bleak, shadowy town. Lewis calls the starting place the Grey Town, and the travelers are taken toward a radiant country that contrasts sharply with their earlier surroundings. The book uses a dreamlike journey to explore choices, desire, repentance, and the nature of heaven and hell.
The Grey Town is not simply a conventional map location. It functions as an imaginative symbol of spiritual isolation and self-absorption. Some readers confuse it with the bright destination or with settings from Lewis’s other fictional worlds, especially Narnia. The book’s title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis presents his own argument through conversations between symbolic characters, including figures whose habits prevent them from accepting joy.