Reviews with content warning for Transphobia - The Fifth Elephant

I found this one of the better City Watch books. Not that others were particularly bad, but the City Watch sub-series is significantly less funny overall than many of the other Discworld sub-series and tends to tackle a lot of bigger, heavier political issues, which I generally find less interesting. Despite also having more than its fair share of political commentary, though, I enjoyed The Fifth Elephant quite a lot.

This sub-series is definitely about Vimes almost completely now, and I enjoy it. He’s gruff and gets stuff done and is a cop to his core. Everything keeps conspiring to get him out of his comfort zone, though, and it’s always entertaining to see him apply cop logic and strategies to situations where most of us wouldn’t even think to apply it. Vimes has a hammer, so every situation looks like a nail, and somehow it just seems to work. In this book, his hammer of Watch mindset gets aimed at diplomacy.

This book is heavy on the themes. The art of diplomacy, the nature of lies and truth and how we define each, and power and the difficulties of wielding it well are big in this one. But so is the power of belief, traditions, and even the Ship of Theseus quesion. The power of belief has been a big theme in a lot of Discworld books lately – I don’t know if there’s a reason, but it’s interesting.

But just because there’s a lot of themes doesn’t mean there aren’t entertaining things happening. Because there are so many things happening:

The Mystery of the Stolen Scone!
The complicated politics between werewolves, dwarves, and dwarves!
A prison break!
Fun facts about werewolves!
Not-so-fun encounters with werewolves!
The Watch attempts to function with both Vimes and Carrot gone!
Carrot and Angua have some Relationship Concerns(TM)!
Vimes has to do a diplomacy!

The book even managed to have a bit of a trans rights message without having any actual trans characters, which was a wild experience. I appreciate the message (slightly muddled as it is) and that whole plot thread was fascinating from a story perspective, but I’m not sure how I feel about it with modern eyes. Actually, I’m not sure it was supposed to be a trans-positive message in the first place, but it definitely comes across that way in 2023.

This review has been more descriptive than commentative, and that’s because I don’t have much to say about this one. (Except that I don’t like the new audiobook narrator. My favorite Discworld narrator Nigel Planer got replaced by some guy named Steve, and Steve did a terrible job with Carrot’s voice. But that’s only relevant if you read the audiobook, so I digress.) The Fifth Elephant was entertaining, enjoyable, and a good read all around, but there really isn’t much to note. It’s just, on the whole, good.

Content Warnings