The Fifth Elephant: A Novel of Discworld

The Fifth Elephant:

A Novel of Discworld

Harper Collins, 323 pp., $24

There was a span in my life of about 20 years or so -- post-Dungeons and Dragons, post-Tolkien -- when I became a bit of a fantasy snob, the kind of guy who was more than happy to pick up the new sci-fi and horror mass-market editions while wrinkling my nose at anything having an elf, troll, or broadsword-bearing Fabio-lookalike emblazoned on the cover. While I still believe this is not -- in general -- a bad way to look at a genre that, after all, spawned the off-putting Terry Brookes and his Shannara series, this exclusionist attitude also left me about 10 years behind the times when it came to British fantasist Terry Pratchett. I quickly changed my tune, however, a number of years back after reading Pratchett's howlingly funny tale of god, the devil, and the end of the world -- Good Omens -- which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. It was the latter who sucked me in, but Pratchett's the one who benefited the most thoroughly from my indoctrination. I promptly went out and bought everything the man had ever written -- or, at least, everything in the Discworld series -- and haven't looked back.

The Fifth Element is Pratchett's 24th (!) novel in the chronicles of the Discworld (he's nothing if not prodigious). For initiates, Discworld is Pratchett's semi-medieval stand-in for our own world, and one which he uses to great comic effect to poke fun at and make some very specific points about modern times. Like other fantasists, Pratchett uses the standard rotisserie of mythological creatures -- dragons, dwarves, trolls, witches, and wizards among them -- but the similarities end there. Imagine The Lord of the Rings as done by Monty Python and Douglas Adams and you'll have an idea of Pratchett's warped sensibilities.

In The Fifth Elephant, Pratchett skewers modern technology (something like the telegraph comes into play), racial prejudice (dwarf vs. troll), and political maneuvering (vampires and werewolves vs. everyone else) in an absolutely hilarious -- and quite trenchant -- tale of Ankh-Morpork City Watch Commander Sam Vimes and his difficulties as the new ambassador to Uberwald, the dark country of the undead and the shapeshifters. Pratchett's writing is clean and swift -- there are no chapters in his books, and I tore through The Fifth Element in one (very) late-night sitting. His humor, much of it the distinctly dry, British persuasion, is laugh-out-loud funny (more than once I was glared at for doing just that at four in the morning when all sane people are asleep, or at the very least, in bed), and this is by far and away one of his better books. True, my favorite recurring Pratchett character, Death -- who always speaks LIKE THIS, IN ALL CAPS -- makes only a brief cameo, but that personal quibble (more Death, please!) aside, this is one of Pratchett's finest works to date, complex in its characterization and plotting, nuances, and nearly as hilarious as the political machinations we've got going on here in "the real world."