The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 24: The Fifth Elephant

Long ago, it is said, there was a fifth elephant perched atop the shell of Great A’Tuin. But it fell into space and came crashing down in the wilds of Uberwald, providing the later inhabitants with a vast supply of raw fat to be mined for their future profit.

Thousands of years later, Commander Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh, has been sent by the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork to act as an ambassador, negotiating reasonable rates for the sale and transport of fat to that great city. However, Uberwald is in terrible shape at the moment: the Dwarves are experiencing unrest as the new Low King is enacting some unpopular progressive laws, while the werewolf clans are fostering this unrest in a plan to take control of the crumbling empire. Meanwhile, Lady Sybil is trying to tell Vimes something…

The Fifth Elephant (1999) is not the most brilliant of Discworld novels, and it is most definitely not a good place to start if you have never read any of the books before. But for those of us who are seasoned travellers it is a lot of fun.

While the first novel in the Watch series, Guards! Guards! was a pretty straight private eye spoof, the later novels, Men At Arms and Feet Of Clay, leaned more towards straight police procedurals. Jingo, on the other hand, was more of a thriller, with Vimes needing to stop a war.

This is a pretty logical progression because Vimes is no longer a man operating almost on his own, but has the resources of a growing police department under his command. In this book, though, Vimes takes a more traditional step for a member of the gentry to take: he heads up a diplomatic team, making this novel a fish-out-of-water spy thriller.

However, there is a twist: the Patrician has sent Vimes to also solve a mystery. It seems that someone has been destroying Clacks posts, which could affect the financial stability that the Patrician has been trying to build up for Ankh-Morpork. Vimes has to find out what is happening and put a stop to it.

The Clacks, for those who haven’t read any later books in the series, is a Discworld variation of semaphore. Semaphore is a pre-industrial communication system that uses flags, lights or large pivoted arms to communicate information. Through this system messages that could have taken weeks to cross a country could be transmitted in days or even hours. It was invented in the late eighteenth century by Claude Chappe and dominated international communication until the invention of the telegraph just a few decades later.

I grew up in a city that had many old semaphore stations that had been repurposed into other buildings. However, most of them kept some vestige of their past history so it was easy to find out more about them or to get a sense of their scale and purpose.

As a redundant technology, semaphore has had an attraction to many writers: Keith Roberts used it in his mosaic novel Pavane, and I used it in my first novel as well. They’re a potent symbol of a culture that is about to burst out of their technological shell, which is part of what Pratchett tries to achieve with them: in the later books, they become a non-electric telegraph-cum-proto-internet which leads to some interesting implications.

Which is what The Fifth Elephant is largely famous for: Uberwald was introduced to us in Carpe Jugulum, but here it goes beyond the classic horror stereotypes of a fantasyland Transylvania and becomes a full-blooded country that has some important ties to the rest of the Disc. Characters and situations are laid down here that will be further explored in later books. And without risking any spoilers, you can argue that Uberwald represents any sprawling unknown-to-outsiders region containing precious resources guarded by lethal locals who are shrouded in mystery. It’s also a lot funnier than Dune.

We also get the introduction of what a later book will refer to as the Dark Clerks: people who the Patrician employs as accountants and administrators but who are, in reality, highly trained spies and assassins.

There’s also the dwarves, who are discovering that they are, in fact, becoming quite influential politically. They play no small part (sorry) in this story, having their own stakes in the outcome of trade talks with Ankh-Morpork. There’s been a lot of talk about which particular human culture the dwarves are supposed to represent. Frankly, though, you can apply them to any rigid, traditionalist culture that clings needlessly to old rules because “we’ve always done things this way” and which seeks to control the appearance and lives of the female members of their society.

And, after having some scorn poured on vampires in the last book, we meet Lady Margolotta, a vampire who has taken the “pledge” to not drink human blood. She’s the first of several vampires who have taken “the pledge” that we will meet in upcoming books, but not the last.

But back to the book…

The story is a bit of a cracker, frankly: while Vimes has taken up a diplomatic position, Sergeant Angua has left Ankh-Morpork in the company of another werewolf who brings news from home (coincidentally the same region of Uberwald that Vimes is headed for), with Captain Carrot following her. Gaspode the Wonder Dog plays a large part in their plotline, too.

Vimes, meanwhile, is learning heaps about diplomacy after cutting his teeth in the recent conflict with Klatch in Jingo. This doesn’t stop him and Sybil from landing on the wrong side of a disagreement with the local werewolf clan, which sparks the rest of the plot into action, very little of which I’m going to spoil here, save that it leads to an exciting conclusion.

And Lady Sybil finally takes an active part in the plot of a book she appears in for the first time Since Guards! Guards!

So why isn’t it brilliant?

Well, that’s largely subjective on my part, and it’s mostly down to one plotline that could have been excised with very little damage to the book.

While Vimes, Carrot, Angua and Detritus (acting as bodyguard to Vimes and Sybil) are out of town, the running of the Watch falls to Sergeant Colon.

I’m not a big fan of Colon: he undergoes some growth over the course of the series and becomes more bearable as time goes on, but he is still a walking definition of the “racist uncle” who believes in harmful stereotypes because it’s easier than thinking. And after having worked with several dyed-in-the-wool racists (a couple of whom used the “graduated from the school of hard knocks” line unironically) I just can’t be having with that sort of crap from characters who I’m supposed to believe are on the same side as our heroes.

At any rate, Colon’s attitudes and generally suspicious nature cause a lot of dissension in the ranks of the remaining Watch members and he is on the verge of being responsible for a mass resignation of officers when everything gets wrapped up neatly for him with no consequences whatsoever.

It’s the only subplot in any Discworld novel that does absolutely nothing for me and might actually make me a bit more grumpy.

But it does reflect the general “old-fashioned versus modern” story that is being played out by the other characters in distant Uberwald, so it does serve a purpose.

Despite that, The Fifth Elephant is an exciting novel that adds a lot to Discworld lore. It furthers a lot of the ongoing storylines – especially Vimes and Lady Sybil’s – and does pave the way for a lot of the later novels. The conclusion also appears to wrap things up favourably for this situation, despite leaving some wriggle room for future conflict between the temporarily reconciled cultures.

Coming Up Next: Ankh-Morpork gets its first newspaper, and there’s a race to see who can keep up with the Times in The Truth.