The Fifth Elephant
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| Corgi Press |
Terry Pratchett
1999
Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- Colour of Magic - Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Jingo - Last Continent - Carpe Jugulum - Raising Steam - Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations - Pratchett Portfolio - Dodger - Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)
“Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.”
The Last Continent and Carpe Jugulum, books twenty-two and twenty-three of the Discworld series, were landmark Pratchett novels in the sense that they contained the final headline appearances of Rincewind and The Witches; a group of characters whose popularity played no small part in the success of the entire franchise, and thus Pratchett's entire career. With book twenty-four, the author moved on to his next most-successful creations (though DEATH might have something to say about that), Sam Vimes' continually-expanding Ankh-Morpork City Watch. In hindsight, over fifteen years later, I consider The Fifth Elephant to be another landmark in the continual development of the Discworld, this time for very different reasons- and not entirely positive ones.
Looking back across the series at this point, I think it's fairly obvious that the basis for Pratchett's greatest successes have been with characters and stories that focus most on the cornerstone of his satire; the fantasy genre. Obviously every Discworld book is built around a fantastical base, full of fantastical characters and threats taken and re-appropriated from a million different sources, and that's never going to change, but what has changed over time and continually does so is Pratchett's focus on the importance of that fantasy in the grand scheme of things.
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The development of the Discworld's biggest city, grande old Ankh-Morpork, illuminates Pratchett's overall direction and increasingly tight control over the minutia of his creation; the Ankh-Morpork the reader was introduced to in The Colour of Magic was wild, dangerous and seemingly unmapped, where Pratchett threw out funny idea after funny idea, caring less about the logical structure of his fictional city than he did stamping his mark as a young satirist. As a result, the city he was left with when he realised his series was popular enough for sequels contained a selection of elements that didn't really make sense as part of the base of a functioning city, such as the thieves guild, for example.
Across the next twenty books Pratchett embraced some of these ideas and made them workable, while quietly pushing others to the wayside. He also began to carve out his city as a more sensible, controllable entity with an active political scene, mostly shown through the expansion and development of the Watch, and of Sam Vimes personally. In the meantime though, Pratchett had a variety of series-within-series to dip in and out of, helping him explore every corner of the Disc, thanks to the Rincewind, Witches and Death series. For better or for worse, The Fifth Elephant marks the moment where, in my opinion, the balance of the series shifts heavily away from this variety, towards the more directly-progressive and narrowly-focused goal of developing Ankh-Morpork as a more realistic city, and moving it out of its strange mixture of renaissance and medieval influences into Pratchett's facsimile of the Victorian age.
On the surface of it, the plot seems more exciting than that; following on from the macabre events of Carpe Jugulum Pratchett again brings the vast, unknown country of Ubervald into the mix, and delves into the family history of one of the Watches most mysterious employees and also it's best sniffer dog, Sergeant Angua, who debuted in Men At Arms where readers also discovered that she happens to be a werewolf. Events kick off when the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (who Pratchett has spent more and more time with in recent years, while frustratingly never writing an origin for him) sends Sam Vimes to Ubervald under the guise of diplomacy, to negotiate terms with the Low King of the Dwarves. Since this is still, after all, a Watch book, this quickly turns into a crime investigation where Vimes must retrieve the Dwarves stolen thing for the sake of the dwarf ritual thing, etcetera etecetera.
One of the two key problems with this book that has, for years, made it quite possibly my least favourite Discworld novel of them all (though it has competition from a couple of more recent, similar numbers) are that the dwarves are really, really, really really boring. I'm not even blaming Pratchett for this; Dwarves are amazingly boring in all realms of fantasy, having had their moment in the sun in The Hobbit. If you think about it for more than a few moments the concept of dwarf warriors is ridiculous, particularly in conjunction with them being at war with trolls. On the one hand you have a race of huge, unfeeling creatures made entirely out of rock, and on the other you have a race of midgets wearing excessive amounts of leather.
Back in the early days of the Discworld, when Pratchett was simply plucking whichever respected fantasy genre idioms he fancied, dwarves were fine as they were in the background, but now, more than ten years on, in The Fifth Elephant Pratchett tries harder than ever to carve them a more detailed existence. The Low King is the biggest beneficiary of this, receiving extensive back and forth dialogue with Vimes that never fully clicks, since it's an early example of Pratchett creating a character with buckets of pseudo-wisdom that never really says anything (more of that later in the Discworld series, with a huge amount in Raising Steam). It's also another example of Pratchett raising the stakes for Vimes, who is basically the Discworld's main character at this point (and, I think, Pratchett's own personal avatar), promoting him from chief of police to international politician following the events of Jingo.
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Still, all this talk of dwarves ignores the genuine highlight of the book; the comedy of Sgt. Colon trying to run the Watch back in Ankh-Morpork and going completely insane under the pressure. Those segments are short, but awesome and hilarious, almost making the whole novel worthwhile. I should also mention that things pick up in the dramatic action department when Vimes eventually encounters the werewolves, but by no means is this interesting enough to make up for the drudgery that comes before this. Not even a long-awaited conversation between Vimes and DEATH manages that.
So, in an attempt to try and bring this rambling review to some sort of conclusion, my final thoughts; released at a point in the series where Pratchett seemed focused on writing metaphorically widescreen big-budget action epics, to great critical and commercial success (this was the first and only Pratchett book I saw being shown off at high school just after release), The Fifth Elephant suffered from being a muddled disappointment in comparison. While Pratchett is obviously the god of this world and can do as he pleases, from a critical standpoint this book (and other aspects of the series in the future) suffers from his insistence on focusing on corners of the Disc that just aren't very interesting, rather than fully exploring any of the set-up angles he'd created in the past.
His attempts to create a realistic political scene, complete with important diplomatic players and racial tensions probably works well if you're interested in that sort of thing, but it is a marked departure from the wild freedom of past Discworld books. It is, in a sense, the opposite of a book like Moving Pictures, where Pratchett uses the built-in excuse of magic to satirise something immediately recogisable in the moving picture industry, since instead The Fifth Elephant relies on a series of set-universal rules and tones. This might have been fine if they weren't sadly very boring, and if so much of the future of the Disc didn't depend on it.
The Last Continent and Carpe Jugulum, books twenty-two and twenty-three of the Discworld series, were landmark Pratchett novels in the sense that they contained the final headline appearances of Rincewind and The Witches; a group of characters whose popularity played no small part in the success of the entire franchise, and thus Pratchett's entire career. With book twenty-four, the author moved on to his next most-successful creations (though DEATH might have something to say about that), Sam Vimes' continually-expanding Ankh-Morpork City Watch. In hindsight, over fifteen years later, I consider The Fifth Elephant to be another landmark in the continual development of the Discworld, this time for very different reasons- and not entirely positive ones.
Looking back across the series at this point, I think it's fairly obvious that the basis for Pratchett's greatest successes have been with characters and stories that focus most on the cornerstone of his satire; the fantasy genre. Obviously every Discworld book is built around a fantastical base, full of fantastical characters and threats taken and re-appropriated from a million different sources, and that's never going to change, but what has changed over time and continually does so is Pratchett's focus on the importance of that fantasy in the grand scheme of things.
The development of the Discworld's biggest city, grande old Ankh-Morpork, illuminates Pratchett's overall direction and increasingly tight control over the minutia of his creation; the Ankh-Morpork the reader was introduced to in The Colour of Magic was wild, dangerous and seemingly unmapped, where Pratchett threw out funny idea after funny idea, caring less about the logical structure of his fictional city than he did stamping his mark as a young satirist. As a result, the city he was left with when he realised his series was popular enough for sequels contained a selection of elements that didn't really make sense as part of the base of a functioning city, such as the thieves guild, for example.Across the next twenty books Pratchett embraced some of these ideas and made them workable, while quietly pushing others to the wayside. He also began to carve out his city as a more sensible, controllable entity with an active political scene, mostly shown through the expansion and development of the Watch, and of Sam Vimes personally. In the meantime though, Pratchett had a variety of series-within-series to dip in and out of, helping him explore every corner of the Disc, thanks to the Rincewind, Witches and Death series. For better or for worse, The Fifth Elephant marks the moment where, in my opinion, the balance of the series shifts heavily away from this variety, towards the more directly-progressive and narrowly-focused goal of developing Ankh-Morpork as a more realistic city, and moving it out of its strange mixture of renaissance and medieval influences into Pratchett's facsimile of the Victorian age.
On the surface of it, the plot seems more exciting than that; following on from the macabre events of Carpe Jugulum Pratchett again brings the vast, unknown country of Ubervald into the mix, and delves into the family history of one of the Watches most mysterious employees and also it's best sniffer dog, Sergeant Angua, who debuted in Men At Arms where readers also discovered that she happens to be a werewolf. Events kick off when the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (who Pratchett has spent more and more time with in recent years, while frustratingly never writing an origin for him) sends Sam Vimes to Ubervald under the guise of diplomacy, to negotiate terms with the Low King of the Dwarves. Since this is still, after all, a Watch book, this quickly turns into a crime investigation where Vimes must retrieve the Dwarves stolen thing for the sake of the dwarf ritual thing, etcetera etecetera.
One of the two key problems with this book that has, for years, made it quite possibly my least favourite Discworld novel of them all (though it has competition from a couple of more recent, similar numbers) are that the dwarves are really, really, really really boring. I'm not even blaming Pratchett for this; Dwarves are amazingly boring in all realms of fantasy, having had their moment in the sun in The Hobbit. If you think about it for more than a few moments the concept of dwarf warriors is ridiculous, particularly in conjunction with them being at war with trolls. On the one hand you have a race of huge, unfeeling creatures made entirely out of rock, and on the other you have a race of midgets wearing excessive amounts of leather. Back in the early days of the Discworld, when Pratchett was simply plucking whichever respected fantasy genre idioms he fancied, dwarves were fine as they were in the background, but now, more than ten years on, in The Fifth Elephant Pratchett tries harder than ever to carve them a more detailed existence. The Low King is the biggest beneficiary of this, receiving extensive back and forth dialogue with Vimes that never fully clicks, since it's an early example of Pratchett creating a character with buckets of pseudo-wisdom that never really says anything (more of that later in the Discworld series, with a huge amount in Raising Steam). It's also another example of Pratchett raising the stakes for Vimes, who is basically the Discworld's main character at this point (and, I think, Pratchett's own personal avatar), promoting him from chief of police to international politician following the events of Jingo.
Still, all this talk of dwarves ignores the genuine highlight of the book; the comedy of Sgt. Colon trying to run the Watch back in Ankh-Morpork and going completely insane under the pressure. Those segments are short, but awesome and hilarious, almost making the whole novel worthwhile. I should also mention that things pick up in the dramatic action department when Vimes eventually encounters the werewolves, but by no means is this interesting enough to make up for the drudgery that comes before this. Not even a long-awaited conversation between Vimes and DEATH manages that.So, in an attempt to try and bring this rambling review to some sort of conclusion, my final thoughts; released at a point in the series where Pratchett seemed focused on writing metaphorically widescreen big-budget action epics, to great critical and commercial success (this was the first and only Pratchett book I saw being shown off at high school just after release), The Fifth Elephant suffered from being a muddled disappointment in comparison. While Pratchett is obviously the god of this world and can do as he pleases, from a critical standpoint this book (and other aspects of the series in the future) suffers from his insistence on focusing on corners of the Disc that just aren't very interesting, rather than fully exploring any of the set-up angles he'd created in the past.
His attempts to create a realistic political scene, complete with important diplomatic players and racial tensions probably works well if you're interested in that sort of thing, but it is a marked departure from the wild freedom of past Discworld books. It is, in a sense, the opposite of a book like Moving Pictures, where Pratchett uses the built-in excuse of magic to satirise something immediately recogisable in the moving picture industry, since instead The Fifth Elephant relies on a series of set-universal rules and tones. This might have been fine if they weren't sadly very boring, and if so much of the future of the Disc didn't depend on it.
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