The Fifth Elephant: A Novel of Discworld - Hardcover

Pratchett, Terry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061051578 ISBN 13: 9780061051579

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

Synopsis

A new visit to the outrageous and hilariously satiric Discworld involves a search for the missing elephant from the five who support Discworld on their backs, as a stolen scone, a dwarf coronation, and ruby tights get into the act.

About this title

Review:

Terry Pratchett has a seemingly endless capacity for generating inventively comic novels about the Discworld and its inhabitants but there is in the hearts of most of his admirers a particular place for those novels which feature the hard-bitten captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch Samuel Vimes. Sent as ambassador to the Northern principality of Uberwald where they mine gold, and iron and fat, but never silver, he is caught up in an uneasy truce between dwarfs, werewolves and vampires, in the theft of the Scone of Stone (a particularly important piece of dwarf bread) and in the old werewolf custom of giving humans a short start in the hunt and then cheating...

Pratchett is always at his best when the comedy is mixed with a real sense of jeopardy that even favourite characters might be hurt if there was a good joke in it. As always the most unlikely things crop up as the subjects of gags--Chekhov, grand opera, the Caine Mutiny--and as always there are remorselessly funny gags about the inevitability of story:

"They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains.

No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it--philosophically speaking--make a noise?

As for the dwarfs, whose legend it is, and who mine a lot deeper than other people, they say that there is a grain of truth in it".

All this, the usual guest appearances and Gaspode the Wonder Dog... -- Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Precisely balanced . . . excellent set pieces . . . a cracking comic thriller." (The Times)

"He would be amusing in any form and his spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction." (Mail on Sunday)

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0061051578
• ISBN 13: 9780061051579
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 321