The Childermass

The Childermass is the first volume of the unfinished epic "The Human Age" and is unarguably the most radical, outlandish, and formally experimental work in Lewis’s oeuvre. The novel follows the adventures of two Englishmen, Sattersthwaite and Pullman, presumably killed in the Great War, as they posthumously navigate a bizarre purgatorial afterlife while awaiting admission to something called The Magnetic City. Lewis in "The Childermass" spends a good deal of time dramatizing his theoretical, political, and aesthetic concerns. Along the way, he produces extensive parodies of the styles of both James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, while also pushing the inimitable Lewisean sentence he had developed in Tarr to its extreme limits.