I think this is where I first learned the word "queue" (which has greatly helped my Scrabble game over the years!). The Narrator in Lewis' Great Divorce sees a line and gets in it, as there doesn't seem to be anything better to do in gray town where he finds himself. Lewis intends for us to realize much later that this gray town is hell and the bus the line is waiting for offers a visit to heaven, but nervous publishers always give that away on the cover or inside flap, doubting that the title or even Lewis' name will sell the book if people don't know "what it's ABOUT;" it is doubtful anyone ever reads the story without having this sort of "spoiler" from the beginning.
If I did first learn the word "queue" from this book, it means I read it before the many other British novels I have read since, and before I'd seen much British TV or film. Consequently, the various characters and accents I now recognize were totally new to me, and I missed a good deal of the subtle humor and social criticism Lewis offers here. But I think I must have picked up the fact that hell was depicted, here at the beginning, as waiting in line. And though the line is moving, it is due to the fact that various people in it get disgusted with the line--or more often with each other--and leave.
It also means that when I first read this book, it was near to the time I first read Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit, which gives us the line "Hell is other people." Though there is far more that Lewis and Sartre would disagree on, to some extent they seem to agree on this. Though Sartre's hell is a closed room and Lewis' hell is an ever-expanding suburb, one of the things that makes hell hell is the company, and neither would agree with the flippant statement often made, "Sure I want to go to hell; that's where all my friends are!" One's friends, if not unbearable in this life, certainly will be once they've become hellions!
