13 OCTOBER 1950, Page 12

Fiction THE Helena of Mr. Evelyn Waugh's new novel is

Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great and the discoverer of the True Cross. The novel, presented as "a legend," is light and compressed, entertains various nicely tempered and amusing notions and has many graces of style, but is perhaps to be considered as a devotional exercise in a serio-comic vein of historical fancy. Mr. Waugh accepts the suggestion that Helena was born in Britain—was, in fact, the daughter of Old King Cole (or Coel)—and his story opens in Colchester in the year 273 with a slave reading to her from the Iliad in Latin paraphraser Helena herself is charmingly realised as a young woman, and both the present-day slangy idiom of the dialogue, though it grows a little wearisome in the context of a situation one remembers reading abdut in Dill or Gibbon, and the impulsive little bursts of anachronistic sentiment often give a piquant gaiety to Mr. Waugh's satire. Both history and human character, however, are projected in a rather dim light, so that Helena's pilgrimage in old age to the Holy Land misses any sort of crowning narrative effect. This is a lightly devotional, decorative, frequently entertaining, but not very substantial work of fiction.

Mr. George Millar's Through the Unicorn Gates I enjoyed and admired from start to finish. It seems to me to be the work of a writer of very genuine and lively talent and of consider- able potentialities as a novelist—a vigorously observant, imaginatively perceptive and richly comic book. I am not sure that I can describe it, for Mr. Millar's disciplined enough story-telling purpose goes with a brilliant and high-spirited faculty of improvisation. Lady Almond, who during and after the last war lives in a large and historic manor-house named Wayke's Newbourne, is in the seventies, an intelligent, humane, eccentric, aristocratic and dying woman. The house is in a secluded part of the country (Dorsetshire ?), and she • depends upon a servant and a trio of gardeners and upon the resources of her own mind. There is nothing I would quarrel with in Mr. Millar's finely composed and humorously eloquent portrait, which exhibits his idiosyncratic strength of will and personality with scrupulous detachment., About the dotty and formidable rustics—Mrs. Pitman, Bye, Minnow and the rest—who provide some irresistibly comic passages, I am not so sure. They have, the terrifying Mrs. Pitman more par- ticularly, the authentic knobbiness, the impermeable obstinacy of their kind in real life, but I suspect that Mr. Millar would have got rather more out of Ahem if he bad *tried now and then to curb his high spirits. Still, they are exceedingly funny and the slightly ghoulish comedy of the closing sequence of -disasters, as Lady Almond is nearing her end, is superbly