Waugh pre-empts the findings of Eileen Barker’s seminal study of conversion to new religious movements in her work of 1984 The Making of a Moonie. There is a truth in such sudden jumps in belief. Helena after questioning several religions throughout the book is suddenly revealed in a later chapter as a confirmed Christian. There is a lack of psychological depth in the novel.

It is something that Waugh would have picked up on instantly in someone else. This reluctance is the most interesting part of the novel. Indeed this institution was something he explicitly identified himself with. The novel never questions whether Constantine was Christian, let alone what this might mean for the institutional Christianity left behind. Certain figures are mocked like Eusebius, but in general the tone is respectful. Waugh doesn’t go the full way and critique Christianity. His son Constans killed all his relatives except one Julian who rebelled against him and rejected the family’s Christianity.

Although remembered fondly Constantine’s family was incredibly bloody.

A tragic denouement is the murder of Crispus, Constantine’s son and (in the novel) Helena’s beloved grandson. In Helena, hierarchy is murderously incompetent. The new building of the Church of the Sepulture mirrors Professor Silenus’ redesign of a tudor manor house in Decline and Fall. Waugh turns his acute social attenae onto an imagined Roman Empire. Helena tells the tale of St Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. It is notable then, that his more catholic novels are the least satisfactory of his entire oeuvre. This means the majority of his books were written as a catholic artist. Even after the war was won, England was lost to the evils of a Labour Government and Free Healthcare for all. This apocalypticism is best evoked in the preface of Brideshead Revisited. He wrote when those horrors were just on the horizon again when, to repeat a well worn phrase, the storm clouds were gathering over Europe. The world he experienced as a young man was a burst of sunlight after the horrors of war. If Decline and Fall had an almost innocent, Voltairean air, then the trilogy of books produced in the thirties more truly define his work- scorning, bitter and cruel. He should instead be remembered as a thritires writer watching the world implode under dangerous political ideologies. He is remembered today as a twenties writer, even if his first novel Decline and Fall was published only at the end of the decade which defined him. A ruthless critic of of imperialism he was also a racist a mocker of pomposity and class privilege, he became a bloated and much derided supporter of the aristocratic culture. Evelyn Waugh was one of the great authors of the English tradition, with all that entails.

Helena waugh