I stumbled on this little treasure at the Beaumaris branch of the Bayside Library service, and picked it up because it was a title I didn’t know. I thought I’d read everything there was to read of Waugh when I was in my twenties: one of my brothers-in-law loved Waugh’s subversive humour and over a blissful period of months he lent me every title he had. And he was a very rich BIL so he had, I had always thought, the lot. (I’ve always thought that it took some strength of character for my sister to divorce such a very rich man.)
Anyway, although Waugh’s trademark humour makes this a distinctive work, Helena is not anything like A Handful of Dust or Brideshead Revisited or any of the other droll masterpieces of social commentary that you’ve heard of. It is a novella of just over 200 pages, and it’s historical fiction – a…
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The Logical Place 