This is part of the Pratchett Project.
The blurb:
They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That its finest practitioners are subtle, sophisticated individuals for whom nuance and subtext are meat and drink. And that mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on the job.
Which is a shame if you find yourself dropped unaccountably into a position of some significant diplomatic responsibility. If you don't really do diplomacy or haven't been to school with the right foreign bigwigs or aren't even sure whether a nod is as good as a wink to anyone, sighted or otherwise, then things are likely to go wrong. It's just a question of how badly...
There's a lot to like about The Fifth Elephant: the continuing development of Sam Vimes, the expansion of viewpoint from Ankh-Morpork to Uberwald, the existence of fat- and sugar-based mining industries (you could really draw some health metaphors here, but I'll restrain myself).
First, the continuing evolution and growth of Sam Vimes from lowly Night Watch copper to Commander of the Watch to Duke. I'm really enjoying seeing him grow and change across the Watch series. For all he complains that he's just your basic copper and tries to get back to that whenever he can, he displays here that he's actually pretty well suited to Discworld's rough diplomacy. He'll never be as subtle as Vetinari — Vetinari is unmatched on that axis — but he's smarter than he gives himself credit for, and his instincts for human nature are both cynical and, generally speaking, pretty spot on. His encounters with Uberwald's dwarf, werewolf and vampire society prove that. He's more direct, generally — but in his dealings with the dwarf Low King-to-be, Rhys Rhysson, Vimes, there's a lot that goes literally unsaid. It frustrates him, but he gets there pretty efficiently. He's not your typical diplomat, but he gets more done in this one trip than entire diplomatic corps given entire years.
Up until Jingo, the Watch novels were very much in and of Ankh-Morpork. Jingo widened the lens a bit to include Klatch; The Fifth Elephant goes further and takes us to Uberwald, a kind of German-Russian mashup (mostly Germanic, with some Chekhovian interludes, courtesy of three sisters living in an orchard, and their Uncle Vanya's 'gloomy and purposeless' trousers. The expansion, though, is not merely geographic; we get a much closer look at dwarven, werewolf and vampire societies, and these really add to the richness of the novel. Dwarf society is very Irish/Scottish in nature, even though the deepest-dwelling dwarves seem to live in Uberwald. But until now, our window on dwarf society has been mostly Carrot, some Cheery Littlebottom, and both are outliers in some ways. Carrot less to than Cheery; Cheery remarks that Carrot has done all the cultural markers a young dwarf is supposed to, he's fully a dwarf — just a very tall one. Cheery, however, is female and presents as such; shocking, when dwarf society presents itself as a single-gender society to the wider world. Female dwarves are identical to male dwarfs, basically. They're an equal society, but still quite conservative and repressive, so Cheery, presenting as female, and going on a diplomatic mission to the heart of dwarfdom and witnessing the crowning of a new Low King in a dress is something that rocks society to its core. Equally shocking is that the new king accepts her as such — and even asks Cheri for the name of her dressmaker, strongly implying that Rhys Rhysson is in fact female and may choose the option of presenting that way in the future.
Equally shocking is the fact that Rhys shakes hands with Detritus, a troll. The two races have centuries of enmity between them, so this is a real upheaval; seems like Rhys is going to be an extremely progressive king, something that could only have come about with Sam and Cheri keeping their heads and solving the mystery of the theft of the Scone of Stone.
The look at werewolves comes with a very particular look at Angua and I love the emphasis on her. We get what we really haven't had so far — she's a werewolf. She's not a human who turns into a wolf now and then, she's just human-shaped about three quarters of the time, and wolf-shaped the rest of the time. But shape isn't everything — she's not a human, she's not a wolf, she just looks like those things, and The Fifth Elephant is the first book where what that means and just how strong the distinction is to her is made clear.
The Fifth Elephant has the lowest jokes-per-paragraph ratio of any of the Discworld novels I've read so far. That's not a complaint — there's still plenty to crack a grin at, but Pratchett's engaged in serious society-building here and Soul Music levels of jokery would get in the way. Reining the humour in a bit gives Vimes, Littlebottom, Detritus and Angua/Carrot all that much more room to grow.
Started: 11 April 2025
Finished: 13 April 2025
Back home.
More books.
More from the Pratchett Project.