"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

what he was now stuck with. Not the vulnerability, the
indignity or the danger of his situation, but the inexorable
onset of its mundanity. He sighed, deeply, doing so before
it occurred to him that it might attract Fooaltiye's interest.
Fortunately, the sliver wasn't equipped for multi-tasking,
so couldn't listen and concentrate on keeping his fag lit at
the same time.
It was a good time to ask himself what the hell had gone
wrong. Not as good, admittedly, as a few weeks back, when
technically it was still in his gift not to fuck up, but that was
by the by. what mattered was the question of what had
led him to the course of actions that had in turn led him
to this cell; what had caused him to lose his rationality,
his perspective and ultimately his freedom; and what had
changed him from Jack Parlabane, investigative hack, to
Parlabane, John, 46967.
Tricky.
In his guilt-ridden state, it was not a struggle to lay the
responsibility on his own pride and his own stupidity.
Certainly, if he needed a reminder of the level of self-
knowledge attained by blaming society at large for your
own shortcomings, he only had to breathe in the whiff of
burnt, stale tea permeating the cell. However, despite the
curious comforts of self-flagellation, he was wise enough to
understand that it was equally useless to divorce what he
had done from the circumstances in which he had done it.
The whole country, let's face it, had gone a little nuts, and
while it wasn't an excuse, it was still part of the equation.
So had he been punished for being the one sane man
fighting the cause of reason in a world gone crazy? Or had
he been himself infected by the moralistic madness, and
lost his sense of judgement as a consequence? The truth,
he suspected, lay somewhere in between.
The political climate had altered suddenly and violently,
something which, in Parlabane's experience, political climates
seldom did. New eras in politics were not precipitous. They
didn't dawn, no matter how many fanfares were sounded.
They took shape slowly and subtly, and you didn't realise
you were in the midst of change until that change was
irreversibly underway.
In the natural world, radical climatic change could be
precipitated by nothing less than a disaster, such as a
meteor strike or a volcanic eruption. The political world
was little different, except that its disasters were invariably
of the victims' own making. In the case of both, power fell
to those already equipped to cope with the new conditions,
and to those others who were quickest to adapt.
Parlabane hadn't adapted. This was due to a combination
of disbelief and wilful intransigence.
He had been ready for a lot of things about post-devolution