Finished Mo 12/9/24
This was one of my ancient paperbacks that I first read and finished on Sa 7/17/93.
I spent longer than necessary, but there were several more plotlines than in the average Baldacci novel.
1) Two lovers in the intelligence system are pitted against each other by their bosses. A man witnesses his lover being killed and he's led to believe that she was working for the enemies of America. He leaves 'the business', but later sees his lover by accident. He sees her face and realizes that she hates him. Her handlers have her believing that he is working for 'the enemies'.
2) A political figure, similar to Henry Kissinger, is praised by everyone for his expertise in international policy. However, this man has lost his mind and American intelligence has built a fake town so that they can keep him tethered to some sense of reality.
3) There is a Russian mole who is the American Secretary of State.
From an internet blog:
"The story starts with a defining moment in the life of "Consular Operations" agent Michael Havelock. Having learned that his lover, Jenna Karas, is working with the KGB he is forced to personally gun her down on a beach in Spain. Sickened by her betrayal of him, and by his betrayal of her (he did love her, after all, and he cold-bloodedly murdered her), he calls it quits and retires to an academic existence. But of course it is the case that like Michael Corleone in the third Godfather film, just when he thinks he is out when they pull him back in. The entreaties of various recruiters fail to bring him back to the Great Game, but something else does the trick in short order--Havelock, incredibly, spotting Karas in a train station in Rome. She’s alive! he realizes. And she knows he knows that she knows that he knows that . . . And off he goes after her as she desperately tries to evade the man who shot at her on that beach, Havelock determined to find out how he has been deceived, and why, while American intelligence determines to stop him.
During this phase of the book--which lasts more than half of its six hundred pages--there is an abundance of incident, but very little forward progress of the story. Rather the mechanics of pursuit, evasion, surveillance, combat are, a few hints of more apart (a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of government, the odd behavior of an American Secretary of State whose stature is basically the legend of Henry Kissinger times twenty, the fear that somehow this will lead to nuclear war), pretty much all the narrative has to offer. It is only after the midpoint of the book that Havelock succeeds in tracking Jenna down, and that they start investigating the conspiracy that brought them to this state. The biggest revelations come early, after which the remainder of the book consists mainly of Havelock trying to find a mole whose identity is unambiguously revealed to the reader well before the end (even if there are a few other surprises in store), and never packs quite the dramatic punch that it should because responsibility for Havelock's betrayal ultimately ends up being so diffused.
The result is that The Parsifal Mosaic feels like two, or two-and-a-half, smaller thrillers strung together, each of which runs longer than it ought as a result of the number of links in the chains being longer than would have been optimal, and a fair amount of overwriting, with many a lengthy scene or subplot amounting to less than the space allotted it ought to have warranted. (Havelock’s attempt to intercept Jenna at the Franco-Italian border was overlengthy, the description overly complicated. Meeting with a man in New York who has important information for Havelock about Karas’ whereabouts Havelock realizes that he is a Nazi criminal whose atrocities he personally witnessed as young Michal Havlicek back in Czechoslovakia during the war, now living here under a false identity--but in spite of adding yet another dramatic shock the fact is actually quite unimportant to the story. And so on.)"
Last night I ordered two more novels by Ludlum from Amazon.
