He is at some pains to indicate how confused and heresy-ridden the growing Church was the pious will be shocked and saddened by his portrait of a Constantine whose Christianity was three parts expediency and Is hidden-she directed the excavations whereby the precious wood was found. Through the use of her prerogatives-and a convenient dream in which the Wandering Jew, of all people, tells her where the True Cross Reasons, saw her son crowned Emperor, was proclaimed Empress Dowager, became a Christian. She outgrew her husband, was divorced by him for political This is a tale, now pleasant, now grim, of a young woman, the daughter of a chieftain of ancient Britain and fond of the hunt, who married a visiting Roman officer and followed him to the Continent. Yet like all good novels it operates on more than one level of perception it also makes up in subtlety what it lacks in density of texture. It will be difficult for some to take his book seriously. Since he has taken a good many, including the attribution of British birth to Helena, Waugh lets his readers know what is legend, what is probably fact, and wherein he has invented or otherwise taken liberties with history. His book purports to deal with the life of Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine and legendary discoverer of the pieces of wood many Catholics accept as the True Cross. Velyn Waugh's tenth novel finds him for the first time venturing into that happy hunting ground of lesser writers, the historical
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