What was the name of C.S. Lewis’s fictional world in The Great Divorce?

The fictional world from which the narrator travels in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is called the Grey Town. The book, published in 1945, is a theological fantasy presented as a dream or vision.

In the story, residents of the Grey Town board a bus that takes them to a brighter country. The Grey Town is associated with distance, dissatisfaction, and spiritual refusal, while the solid country represents a more substantial reality. Lewis uses conversations between visitors and inhabitants to explore choices involving pride, resentment, possessiveness, and self-knowledge.

The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis’s book is not a retelling of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is also separate from Narnia and from the planetary settings of the Space Trilogy. The Grey Town is a symbolic afterlife setting created for this particular work.