Helena, Evelyn Waugh

Once again, I chose a book based on recommendation. I opened it in the library to see if I could figure out the basic plot line (I don't like to jump into a book unless I know this) and sat on the floor reading the first five or ten pages. Needless to say, that recommended it to me.

Helena tells the story of St. Helena from a half-fictional, half-historical perspective. St. Helena is the mother of Constantine, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity. She is famous for being pious, establishing churches, and supposedly discovering the true Cross. Not much is known about her background or her relationship with Constantius, the father of Constantine.

Waugh takes liberty in creating a vivid young Helena on the British Isles who falls in love with the adventures she hopes to find as the wife of Constantius. I felt like I knew Helena through her early marriage, the birth of her son, and even up through her divorce. Then, abruptly, the tone shifts. Waugh steps away from Helena. I spent most of the novel anticipating the story of her conversion because she spends so much of the novel seeking. Waugh simply slipped in her conversion as a side note, rather than a major part of the story. I never quite got over that, even though he brought the narration back into her character for a while.

Waugh also has a habit of slipping occasionally from the concrete into heavily abstract language that, quite frankly, lost my attention. Other than these few passages, however, I enjoyed his writing. Like the first five or ten pages, the novel read smoothly and kept me reading. I just had to see it as a novel about a girl from Britain who marries a great Roman and gives birth to a greater one, not as the story of a saint that I expected.