The Fifth Elephant

Another Discworld novel! This one followed Captain Sam Vimes and The City Watch on a diplomatic mission to Uberwald where the werewolves are attempting to start a war among the dwarves. They steal the ceremonial throne just before the coronation of the new king with plans to hold it hostage unless the dwarves agree to elect a  different king, one who would deny dwarfdom to the more liberal dwarves with modern thoughts about gender and such.

This was a fun detective novel with lots of twists and turns. I figured out the mystery fairly quickly, but it was still lots of fun to read. I've noticed this more and more with Terry Pratchett.  If I'm familiar with the source material (vampires, rock music, or fairy tales), then I catch on to a lot of the early clues and figure out the endgame pretty close to the beginning of the book. If I'm less familiar, then I miss the jokes and clues and the resolution of the novel comes as more of a surprise. But I like the ones with familiar source material better. I feel a bit more like I'm in on the joke.

So with The Fifth Elephant, I'm trying to figure out what happened. I like werewolves and I get a lot of the lore. I'm interested in the gender issues that Pratchett brought up. I like a good mystery. But overall, this book was kind of blah. It could be that I didn't get the central metaphor - The Fifth Elephant. This seemed at once obvious and obscure. Within the Discworld universe the metaphor should make sense. The Discworld is supported on the back of four elephants who are standing on a turtle. At some point there was a fifth elephant, but something happened. He slipped off the turtle, got caught in an asynchronous orbit, and crashed onto the Discworld, causing the continents to break up. I'm less sure what this has to do with the story I just read.

Or it could be that I read this book on the plane to Vegas and was only half paying attention to it.

Either way, it was decent filler for a plane ride. I like Sam Vimes' wife a lot more than I did. I want to see what happens next with Cheery the female dwarf. I have kind of lost interest in Carrot and Angua's will-they-won't-they relationship, though. And the watch itself is getting too big. They recruit more characters in every book and it's getting hard to keep them straight.

Next up is The Truth, another City Watch book. But also a spoof of Watergate. Should be interesting

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more