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"Give me real bones every time."

You know, I kind of hate it when I walk into a bookstore looking for presents for somebody else, and walk OUT of that bookstore holding an impulse buy for myself.

But I couldn't help it, guys. It's Evelyn Waugh. Evelyn Waugh at his happiest and most Catholic. I had to. I HAD TO.

Anyway. I'm happy to report that stupid decision though that may have been, I have no regrets. Helena is not Brideshead Revisited, but I mean, no book is, and two masterpieces of exactly the same caliber would be too much to ask even from Evelyn Waugh. It's probably not fair of me to go into this comparing the two novels, because...they're very different. Brideshead is a good 300 pages long and it's told in first person, and while it spans a good twenty years that's mostly because of several well-placed time jumps. Helena is barely 200 pages, narrated omnisciently, and the pacing indulges in idiosyncrasies, lingering over some conversations while skipping lightly over other key events--the deaths of key characters, for instance, might be mentioned in passing. So it's a little hard to "get into." Especially when you've got Brideshead in mind.

BUT BUT BUT. That's not to say Helena isn't absolutely beautiful in its own unique way. Because it is.

I cried at the end.

Things I Really Really Loved:
-) Evelyn Waugh's consistent elegant control over the English language.
-) He is a Master, guys.
-) And he deploys his Mastery to expound on certain Catholic ideas here, including
-) Christianity is a historical FACT, yo
-) the desirability and necessity of asking questions/being intellectually curious about religion
-) the non-desirability of being MERELY intellectually curious about religion.
(There was this really cool tension in the novel between, like, INTELLECTUAL theology and TANGIBLE theology--doctrine vs. relics. Both have an important place, and if you ditch the one, you can easily end up going overboard on the other.)
-) Waugh's appreciation of history, and myth, and how myth has an important PLACE in history but ISN'T history.
-) How delightfully no-nonsense Helena is. ("Bosh!")
-) Romans (including Roman Britons) walking around talking in 20th century British slang.
-) I am so here for all the Roman Britons walking around talking in 20th century British slang.
-) The uncompromising look at Constantine's flaws.
-) Did I mention Helena?

In general, I am agog with A) Waugh's mastery of English, as noted above and B) his grasp of theology. I think I had one theological quibble in the whole book, and that was a sentence which seemed, grammatically, to be saying that both Mary and Jesus "ascended" into Heaven. Which--Evelyn, c'mon, man, you know assumption and ascension are two very different things! This is uncharacteristically sloppy of you. I'm going to give it a pass as poetic license but REALLY, sentences like this are why our Protestant brethren are confused about Catholic Mariology.

Some of the PARTICULARLY BEAUTIFUL theological passages included
-) a meditation on the Magi's importance as patrons of latecomers and intellectual snobs
and
-) how Helena's conversion to Christianity makes it so that there is no longer any "mob" for her, just individuals who might turn out to be her brothers and sisters in Christ, because the Church knows no race or nationality (this was VERY apropos of the eugenic movement which...I'm sure Waugh came across in some function or other, as a guy living in the first half of the 20th century in Britain).

So yeah. This was a Good Book. I liked it muchly. I think I shall read it again and enjoy it even more.

Five stars!