There is basically no plot. There are almost no characters. I don't believe there's a single line of dialogue in the entire novel. It's basically a travelogue and summary of several different alien planets. And this seems to be normal for Stapleton- his Last and First Men seemed like a collection of worldbuilding notes rather than a conventional story.
Science fiction was much smaller and less-established in the thirties, and people could write weird sf novels like this and actually get them past an editor. I don't know that it's possible anymore. At any rate, I don't know of any modern sf writers like Stapleton.
The narrator is an Englishman who is taken out of his body on a kind of astral journey. He wanders immaterially through space for a long, long time before learning how to find planets with intelligent life. He descends to a world, telepathically learns about its people, and recruits some to come with him. This repeats many times, and we see various aliens at different stages of development.
(This is a big deal! One of Stapleton's themes is that all intelligent life evolves through stages towards unity, peace, and wisdom- unless their racial obstacles defeat them and cast them back down the evolutionary ladder, which happens all the time. No Whig History here- Stapleton's a big believer in "Rise and Fall," both here and in LaFM.)
The book's title refers to God. The spirits' quest is to find the Star Maker, and try to understand why He made the universe. As he collects more travellers, they unite spiritually into a group mind and become more and more advanced themselves, even as the universe seems to grind down into failure.
The narrator goes to some lengths to stress that the final scene is incomplete; that we cannot possibly understand what he experienced, since (restored to his human form) he can't even clearly remember it himself. He's too small now. His final understanding of God is... problematic?
It's really neat to see that C.S. Lewis' Perelandra was written as a response to this novel! I can read Weston's monologue there and see exactly what he was talking about- God isn't necessarily good or loving or wise, He's just the being at the top of the spiritual food chain. That's pretty much Stapleton's takeaway, which is not meant as a criticism- as far as Stapleton's concerned, being at the top means that the Star Maker deserves our worship. Which Lewis rightly tore into as power-worship.
Like I said, there are basically no characters, plot, or dialogue. Hardly anything human. But there are amazing vistas, and a sense of scale that's hard to find anywhere else- Stapleton is excellent at evoking the size and age of the entire universe.
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