The Fifth Elephant by: Terry Pratchett

 

While I haven’t been writing reviews for every Discworld novel I read, when I do it’s usually because I have something to say.  Early in 2022 I read Carpe Jugulum and it swiftly became one of my favorites from Pratchett for what it has to say on the encroaching nature of evil and how it evolves, done through the lens of vampires and the aristocracy going against the Lancre witches.  Now, nearly a year later, I’ve returned to Discworld to read the next novel, The Fifth Elephant, a book whose title is a clear reference to The Fifth Element as well as possibly the three Estates of pre-Revolutionary France.  The Fifth Elephant is a Watch book where Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is sent to Uberwald with his wife in his capacity as the Duke and ambassador to the crowning of a new dwarf king.  As with the previous book, this is a novel heavily concerned with aristocratic society and how it uses and abuses those underneath it, though perhaps not as pointedly about the cyclical nature of evil and injustice.  This time instead of vampires, it’s werewolves who have entrenched themselves within an old system of other species, mainly dwarfs who have incredibly rigid standards of gender and sex which must be challenged, as well as discrimination against trolls and tot a lesser extent regular wolves.  That isn’t to say there isn’t a vampire in The Fifth Elephant, but her part in the plot is only there to accent what Pratchett is doing and give Vimes someone to really work off.

 

Samuel Vimes as a character is an important one, he is in every sense of the world an honorable man despite being a cop, but hey this is the Discworld where perhaps ACAB doesn’t always have to apply.  He is also an officer and a gentleman above all else, often having his brain for normal human interactions with his wife be taken over to let her take the lead.  Sybil Ramkin is a character who Pratchett hasn’t always used, but here her role in events is perfect and underpins the idea of change with the final reveal of her pregnancy which breaks Vimes.  Breaking Vimes is not a bad thing, it mainly gets him out right at the end of the very systematic way of thinking and gets him to confront the fact that he is about to be a father, something that is not resolved at the end of the novel but it ties into a lot of Pratchett’s ideas about family.  Family is important to the dwarfs as is tradition, the werewolf leaders of Uberwald are Angua’s family, and Carrot and Angua hint at starting a family of their own by the end of the book (with this beautiful promise that Carrot will do whatever is necessary if Angua goes bad).

 

Angua’s family are your classic aristocrats who are out of touch and typically ruthless, her brother Wolfgang is an idiot with a taste for flesh who spends much of the middle of the novel hunting Vimes down as a game, her father is more wolf than man and has lost his senses, and her mother is the only one with any mind for strategy being partially responsible for the plan to steal a replica of the Scone of Stone which is integral in the coronation of the new dwarf king.  There are also quite a few things Pratchett has to say actively on the gender roles here which have evolved further from earlier novels with Cheery Littlebottom’s plot running in tandem with Vimes being the highlight of the book.  The plots with Vimes, Sybil, Cheery, and Detritus running one arm while Carrot, Angua, and Gaspode the Wonder Dog from Moving Pictures run the other incredibly well with the only real complaint being the third, much smaller subplot of Sergeant Colon promoting himself to Captain and having the rest of the Watch revolt due to his sloth and incompetence.  It’s not a bad plot by any means, but it does get in the way of what The Fifth Elephant is doing better and honestly Pratchett realizes it about halfway when it comes to a premature close and is not mentioned again until the very end of the novel.

 

Overall, The Fifth Elephant may be a title that’s a parody and doesn’t quite explain what the book is doing, but what the book is doing is brilliant and honestly if you aren’t reading these novels in order you will not get the brilliant one, two punch of Carpe Jugulum followed by The Fifth Elephant as those in power were clearly on Pratchett’s mind near the turn of the millennium.  9/10.