| Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Brookmyre
Publisher: Abacus
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 1938
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0349118817
EAN: 9780349118819
ASIN: 0349118817
Publication Date: June 5, 2008
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
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 Worst yet November 11, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...
Don't give up October 22, 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.
Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason August 15, 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.
That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".
A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."
Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...
I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.
 a revelation August 15, 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...
Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.
Another Stoater! July 31, 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.
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