Books: Czech Mates

THE PARSIFAL MOSAIC by Robert Ludlum

Random House; 630 pages; $15.95

“My books are known,” confides the trench-coated star of a new American Express television commercial, “but still my face remains a mystery.” Robert Ludlum goes on to reveal his “born identity,” a playful reference to the name of his last novel, but the charade is hardly necessary. From the dust jackets of his ten books and the rounds of TV talk-show appearances that accompany delivery of a new three-word title every other year or so, ex-Actor Ludlum has one of the best-known obscure faces in America. As for his name, it is powerful enough to drive his new thriller. The Parsifal Mosaic, to the crest of the bestseller list one week after publication.

Parsifal is the author’s longest novel so far (more than 100 pages bulkier than The Bourne Identity), with the most complicated plot. As in most of his previous fiction, Ludlum is concerned with what he calls “the excesses of power,” and he addresses his subject with unremitting intensity. His principal characters range from a pundit of Lippmannesque omniscience to a Strangelovean Secretary of State to the Man in the White House, and it is part of Ludlum’s murky artistry that almost no one at any point is unequivocally beyond suspicion.

One of the few unambiguous characters is Michael Havelock, né Mikhail Havliček. The son of a Czech partisan, he goes to the U.S. as a child, amasses a brilliant academic record and becomes the protégé of Secretary of State Anthony Matthias, also a Czech immigrant. After 16 years of successful undercover work as a State Department field agent, Havelock is driven almost to insanity by the supposed murder of his mistress, Jenna Karas, a fellow Czech and coworker. Was she a double agent? Is she really dead? Havelock sets out on a wild, independent attempt to unravel an international cabal that has led his own Government to mark him “beyond salvage”—to be eliminated at all costs.

On the convoluted trail. Havelock pierces a conspiracy that could lead to the end of civilization. Its ingenious masterminds, some demented, some all too sane, have been plotting for decades. Absurd as it sounds. Ludlum makes his doomsday machine smoothly plausible, “a mix of a thousand moves in a triple-sided chess game.” From a sleazy Italian waterfront to the corridors and backwaters of power in Amsterdam, Rome, Athens, Paris and Manhattan—plus an important interlude in the Shenandoah Valley—Parsifal packs in as much gore and grue as geopolitics: Ludlum meticulously researches the loci and foci of his novels. He is somewhat less convincing with his love scenes, never a strong point of the Ludlum oeuvre. In Parsifal, the lovers’ conversations are conducted in Czech, which may be just as well. It’s the thought that counts.

—By Michael Demarest