The Grey Town is the fictional city at the start of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. The narrator begins there before boarding a mysterious bus for a journey to a brighter country.
The 1945 theological fantasy presents the Grey Town as bleak, insubstantial, and seemingly without limit. Its inhabitants are dissatisfied and divided, and the setting establishes the book’s contrast between self-enclosure and the solid reality represented by the destination.
The work is not a retelling of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, although its title alludes to Blake’s poem. Lewis instead develops an allegorical argument about choices, desire, repentance, and the relationship between heaven and hell. The city is sometimes called “the grey town” in descriptions of the book, but the capitalized title “The Grey Town” is the canonical place name used in references.