The Fifth Elephant: Stage Adaptation (Methuen Drama)
by Terry Pratchett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Terry PratchettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-02-21
ISBN: 0413771156
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Book Reviews of The Fifth Elephant: Stage Adaptation (Methuen Drama)
Book Review: Funny, as usual
Summary: 5 Stars
Terry Pratchett has done it again - as expected. His tour-de-force performances with practically every volume of his Discworld series has become the defacto standard that he has set for himself.
Once again, Sam Vines, Commander of the City Watch of the magnificently squalid city of Ankh-Morpork, finds himself in an awkwardly uncomfortable situation. Once again, Sam Vines, Commander of the City Watch of Lord Vetinari's personal chessboard, manages to overcome all odds and finesse his way out of a mess. In the course of all this, there is the whole gamut of humor, ranging from amused smiles, past sudden, surprised guffaws, to helpless outbursts of uncontrolled laughter. Mr. Pratchett has managed to do it again.
What can I say? Nobody does the satirical fantasy humor genre nearly as well as Terry Pratchett. May the gods (and goddesses) that inhabit Dunmanifestin save us if anyone ever does: we'd probably all expire from an overdose of laughter!
Summary of The Fifth Elephant: Stage Adaptation (Methuen Drama)
A new stage adaptation of one of Pratchett's best-selling novels
Commander Vimes is sent to wild, wintry and Transylvania-like Uberwald to establish trade links with the King of the Dwarfs but he ends up trying to stop and inter-species war. On his side though, is a talking dog, a reformed vampyre and a self-made man. You can tell he's self-made because the stitches still show.
Vimes may have arrived as Ankh-Morpork's ambassador but he soon finds it's not all golden chocolate balls. Now he's an escaped prisoner - out in the icy woods, wearing only the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya and being chased by a pack of fascist werewolves who don't play by the rules.
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 that 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, 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 combined with a real sense of jeopardy that even favorite 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, Amazon.co.uk
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