Critics' choices for Christmas : Rembert G. Weakland.

The six volumes in Susan Howatch's Starbridge series impressed me immensely, beginning with Glittering Images, through Glamorous Powers, Ultimate Prizes, Scandalous Risks, and Mystical Paths, to Absolute Truths. She has now written a new novel that could take its place among the best in that series, The High Flier (Knopf, $26, 512 pp.). Although Howatch continues to deal with parapsychological religious phenomena, such material is more integrated and more credible here.

As in the past, Howatch draws on the best in Anglican spirituality and mystical tradition, but this time adds a new sense of suspense and tenseness that was not evident in previous works. Since Hitchcock films are mentioned frequently in the book, I judge they have had an influence on how she has worked out the plot. Even the sexual aspects of the story seem more integral to the whole and are not adventitiously added for a prurient effect.

The plot follows the usual psychological and spiritual breakdown of Carter (Catriona) Graham and then works through her gradual rehabilitation. In so many ways the story could serve as a parody of modern culture and its criteria for success. It is Howatch at her best.

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, I spent three weeks in Siberia, principally in Novosibirsk, with a trip up the Ob River to the old city of Tomsk. Pollution was evident everywhere. I had always been fascinated by Siberia and by the mixture of cultures that resulted because exiles were forced to reside there, either in the gulags or in the far-flung industrial centers. The cruelties perpetrated by Stalin on the human beings sent there have never been fully documented. I could uncover but a glimpse of those horrors in 1990 when the whole world was getting its first real view of these remote areas.

Now, all of this is well documented, with all the gruesome details of the punishments, early deaths, and exterminations inflicted on so many people during those years of isolation, in Colin Thubron's In Siberia (HarperCollins, $26, 288 pp.).

Although his trip took him from Yekaterinburg through Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk to Khabarovsk, Thubron managed side treks by plane or boat up to the more remote and frigid regions of Vorkuta, Dudinka, and the area around Magadan. The details recorded in Thubron's elegant descriptions, from tundra to polluted rivers and lakes to cold mountain peaks, appear even more frightening to the reader than previously imagined. But the author is not just interested in the atrocities of the past. He includes vivid details about the current residents, their myths and beliefs, and the difficult lives they now face. He interviewed person after person and entered into their lives and aspirations--or lack thereof--today. The author's courage in making that solitary trip to uncover all these details struck me as a truly superb feat.

The Penguin Lives series has a fine knack of matching the right author with the perfect subject. To the long list that includes Edmund White on Marcel Proust, Peter Gay on Mozart, and Garry Wills on Saint Augustine appears Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon (Viking, $19.95, 176 pp.). At first I was not sure I needed to read another book on Joan of Arc. But the more I delved into this account, the more fascinated I became with the insights that only an author like Mary Gordon could bring to this complex and over-analyzed subject.

The short chapter on Joan's fierce defense of her virginity, "Virgin Body," contains some of Gordon's finest perceptions. She rightly begins that chapter with: "The display of Joan's charred body to gawking passersby in Rouen ranks high in the annals of brutal exposure. It is impossible to imagine a male hero for whom such a display would be required as a proof of any kind of authenticity." She goes on to show how integrity of body was of primary importance to Joan, a part of her very identity as well as her autonomy.

In addition to her own analysis of Joan's life, Gordon also gives a perceptive critique of others who have told the same story, from Dreyer and Shaw through Brecht and Peguy to Shakespeare, Schiller, and Verdi. Each age has remade Joan according to its image and likeness. Perhaps the complexity of the story with all its loose ends makes a definitive account impossible and lends itself to endless re-interpretation. I was glad that Mary Gordon tried her hand at it too.

Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., is the archbishop of Milwaukee.