One of those adjectives is no longer accurate, but both were correct at the time. The newspaper quote on this cover says “the country’s greatest living novelist”. It’s that rare thing in modern popular literature: a pro-colonialist novel. The juxtaposition of the two books underlines the thematic shift: the world that Vimes is conquering is the world that Granny lived in (there’s even a derogatory little jibe at Lancre along the way).īecause this is a novel about conquest. This is more striking as TFE immediately follows Granny’s Carpe Jugulum, and is largely set in the same part of the world… but not only is the book itself much more succesful than its predecessor, but its protagonist, Vimes, has a much easier time of it than Granny does in the end, despite a few tricky moments along the way.

The fact that Pratchett didn’t realise this and wrote two more Watch novels after Night Watch, not to mention a whole bunch of cameo appearances (even the very next book after The Fifth Elephant, The Truth, was written as a Watch novel and contains heavy Watch presence) may be important for the cycle as a whole, but doesn’t in my mind change the finality of this novel, taken as a novel in itself.īut it’s more than that: The Fifth Elephant seems to me to represent the final obsolescence, in both practical and thematic terms, of the adventures of Rincewind and of Granny Weatherwax – the taming, in a sense, of the worlds that they inhabited. The Fifth Elephant brings the stories of Carrot, Angua and Vimes (and even Colon) to a fitting, even inevitable conclusion, and caps off the story of the Watch as a whole – leaving Night Watch as one last ‘Scouring of the Shire’ epilogue. This is where the world shuts down, gets a little smaller – from here on in, Discworld will seem smaller, and in a way less real. Some of them may even be great.īut this feels like the end.

The Discworld cycle didn’t just collapse after this installment – it went on for more than a dozen more novels. Is it just because Pterry is dead? I don’t think so: I think it’s true of the book itself – this book feels like the end of Discworld. The latest part of my complete Discworld reread

The fifth elephant by terry pratchett