![]() ![]() Reunited with her son after he establishes himself as Number One in Rome and begins to lay plans for a new capital, Constantinople, Helena discovers that post-persecution Christianity in Rome is embroiled in theological controversy, with various forms of Gnosticism threatening to reduce the faith to an arcane “knowledge” (the Greek “gnosis”) accessible only to the elite. For political reasons, Constantius trades in Helena for a trophy wife, and while he climbs the greasy pole of Roman military politics, she retires to the rural quiet of the empire’s periphery and eventually becomes a Christian. ![]() ![]() Helena, whom Waugh first portrays as the horseback-riding, tomboy daughter of the British King Coel (that “merry old soul”), marries a rising young Roman legionary, Constantius, and with him has a son, Constantine. Which makes it an especially appropriate read during Lent-2017. At bottom, though, the novel, the only one of his books Waugh ever read aloud to his children, is an act of faith in the reality of revelation. The eponymous heroine, mother of the Emperor Constantine, talks in her youth like a flapper from the Roaring Twenties the storytelling is spare, lacking the lush prose of Brideshead Revisited Waugh’s preference for “the picturesque the plausible” in historically questionable matters is enough to offend a squadron of academics. Evelyn Waugh’s slim and critically unappreciated novel, Helena, was something of a literary experiment for a modern master of English literature. ![]()
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