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Let’s first try and classify the genre of Evelyn Waugh’s Helena. His characters—or, at least, many of them—are known to have existed…so the book is historical, nonfiction, if you will. Yet Waugh calls Helena a novel…so it must be fiction. It is also a religious tale, and we may as well add part fantasy, as Waugh plays fast and loose with dreams and myths. There you have it: Helena is a true, fantasy tale of religious, historical fiction!

But the genre doesn’t really matter much when compared to the spare, crisp narrative and the somewhat experimental modern-ness of the dialogue, given that the period is fourth century and the setting is the Roman Empire. The plot revolves around Helena, a religious skeptic initially, who questions other believers with simple, annoying, brutal logic. Nevertheless, she is searching for religion, and feels she can become a Christian if given an appropriate sign. She concocts this sign to be the finding of the true cross on which Christ is alleged to have been crucified.

How she goes about this adventure and the degree to which she succeeds makes for entertaining reading. By this point in the book, readers will be completely untroubled by whether or not what they are reading is historical fact, inventive fiction, or a blend of both.

This novel is unique in the Waugh canon. Some have described it as a personal statement of Christianity by Waugh, himself a convert to catholicism. Helena is prized by the author himself as his best work. However, this reviewer, having read all of Waugh’s other novels, cannot agree. The signature satire in every other Waugh novel inevitably builds an expectation for more of the same. Alas, though humorous in parts, this reviewer is left to admire Helena as an experimental work, and a good one at that.