For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and a new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. The shepherds were here long before even the cattle. ‘Like me,’ she said to them, ‘you were late in coming. Toward the end, Helena attends an Epiphany celebration in Bethlehem, and reflects on the meaning of the Wise Men: The book is more than a simple apologia for Christianity though. She wants to know, and Waugh wants to ask: “Do you really believe all this? Believe, I mean, that Mithras killed his bull in the same way you believe Uncle Claudius beat the Goths?” This is exactly as clear and simple as Waugh believed religion should be-either real, historically, or rot. Helena’s discovery of the cross, the “remorseless fact of the lump of wood,” is necessary because it’s the only distinction between Christianity as Waugh saw it and the rest of what Helena calls “bosh” and “rot”-the Gnostics and humanists as much as the Mithras cults of Rome. (Her father is called “King Coel,” and calls, without much ado, for pipe, bowl, and fiddlers.) But it’s also Waugh’s most concerted effort to explain his faith. It’s funny-Waugh makes Helena a horsey British teenager and peppers the book with anachronisms and postmodern jokes. Helena, mother of Constantine and discoverer of the true cross. ( Hachette is reissuing it.) Waugh believed it to be the best thing he ever wrote, though hardly anyone agreed-it’s generally dismissed as a misguided attempt at seriousness, and few people read or write about it at all. It’s the referent of belief itself that’s examined in Helena, Waugh’s only historical novel, and his only one to have dropped out of print.

Perhaps because belief in the novel-as James Wood has suggested-must be contingent where that of religion is absolute, and this, perversely, is what makes fiction “believable”-that it doesn’t demand to be believed. Religion imposes undue limits on literature, and religious fiction, where it exists, too easily becomes garish, saccharine, or just plain bad. Not only has Catholicism positioned itself as an antagonist to culture generally, retreating more and more into conservative and untenable positions, but a largely secular intellectual culture has arrived at the reasonable consensus that religious morality is just too simplistic for art. Even the writing of Catholics like Hilary Mantel, David Lodge, and, I guess, Dean Koontz, isn’t much occupied with “being God’s creature.” There are several reasons for this. Today, Catholic writers-those with a good reputation as writers among both Catholics and non-, and who write “openly” as such-are rare. Conversion was fairly common in the England of Waugh’s day, as were Catholic novelists-though many, with the exception of Waugh and his close contemporary Graham Greene, have been forgotten.

Helena by Evelyn Waugh