{"id":4147,"date":"2017-04-03T05:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4147"},"modified":"2017-04-02T14:46:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T21:46:01","slug":"mark-reads-the-fifth-elephant-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2017\/04\/mark-reads-the-fifth-elephant-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads &#8216;The Fifth Elephant&#8217;: Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the fourth part of\u00c2\u00a0<i>The Fifth Elephant<\/i>, everything gets MORE MYSTERIOUS. Intrigued? Then it&#8217;s time for Mark to read\u00c2\u00a0<i>Discworld<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><b>Journey to Uberwald<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Things are still coming together in this story, and more than ever before, I feel like Pratchett is heaping a whole bunch into the introduction of a book. So many plots! So many mysteries! So much intrigue! I&#8217;m not complaining about any of this, though, because I&#8217;m just as eager to see how he&#8217;ll converge so many different parts.<\/p>\n<p>So! Let&#8217;s start with Vimes, who does a bit more research on his way to Uberwald. There&#8217;s another appearance of the Fifth Elephant myth, which I fully believe is not a myth at all. It&#8217;s not! It happened! How that&#8217;s going to play into the story\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, I believe this section is a clue:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A note was clipped to the next page. He read: &#8220;The Fifth Elephant as a metaphor also appears in the Uberwald languages. Depending on context it can mean &#8216;a thing which does not exist&#8217; (as we would say &#8216;Klatchian mist&#8217;) &#8216;a thing which is other than it seems&#8217; and &#8216;a thing which, while unseen, controls events&#8217; (in the same way that we would use the term\u00c2\u00a0<i>eminence gris<\/i>).&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>IT&#8217;S A HINT, ISN&#8217;T IT? Oh god, that last one could be a reference to Vetinari, or maybe some of the aristocratic families in Uberwald? Oh, I can&#8217;t wait to find out.<\/p>\n<p><b>Constable Shoe<\/b><\/p>\n<p>So many familiar faces are in this book! I was pleased with the return of Reg Shoe, who is tasked with investigating the shocking death of Mister Sonky. More than many of the other detectives\/coppers, he&#8217;s so dutifully straightforward about what he does, and I admired how easily he was able to concentrate and pick up on a ton of important details. His patience makes him good for this job! (And I also like to imagine that Vimes saw this potential in him, even though Vimes probably wouldn&#8217;t admit that out loud.) It&#8217;s because of Shoe&#8217;s clever questioning that we learn two important facts:<\/p>\n<p>1) That Mr. Sonky had not been doing well and had hidden in his office frequently.<\/p>\n<p>2) That\u00c2\u00a0<i>something\u00c2\u00a0<\/i>required a &#8220;special job&#8221; that would boost business at Sonky&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>My mind goes to Uberwald, but I can&#8217;t make a connection. Why would Sonky&#8217;s suddenly be in high demand???<\/p>\n<p>Also: cheese-and-onion Sonky&#8217;s makes me want to EXPIRE FOREVER.<\/p>\n<p><b>The Message<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Okay, I realize I made a simple error, an assumption, that I need to correct here:\u00c2\u00a0<i>We have no confirmation that Angua herself sent the letter that Carrot got<\/i>. Wilhelmina, &#8220;one of Sergeant Angua&#8217;s pigeons,&#8221; delivered a message. WHAT IF IT WAS NOT ACTUALLY FROM HER?<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, Carrot reads a message. It is so upsetting or concerning that he immediately walks over to the Patrician&#8217;s office and\u00c2\u00a0<i>resigns<\/i>. No, he doesn&#8217;t ask for a vacation or time off or a leave or anything of the sort. (Despite that Lord Vetinari is more or less treating it as such.) WHAT THE FUCK WOULD MAKE HIM\u00c2\u00a0<i>QUIT HIS JOB AS CAPTAIN<\/i>?!?!?! Can we also acknowledge that this is now the\u00c2\u00a0<i>second<\/i>\u00c2\u00a0time in this book that Vetinari was surprised by something??? He also seemed rather pleased by the development, too. WHAT IS HE THINKING?<\/p>\n<p><b>Plese HelP This LiTTle doGGie<\/b><\/p>\n<p>HELP ME, I WAS NOT READY FOR THE GLORIOUS RETURN OF GASPODE. Look, I&#8217;ll always have a soft spot for this character after\u00c2\u00a0<i>Moving Pictures<\/i>, which is still one of my favorites in this series. Oh, Gaspode! So cynical and yet still so certain that there\u00c2\u00a0<i>can<\/i>\u00c2\u00a0be some goodness in this world. He&#8217;s going to accompany Carrot to Uberwald and track down Angua! I CAN&#8217;T WAIT FOR HIS SARCASM AND NEGATIVITY and I am probably going to cry at one point, aren&#8217;t I?<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s got the best nose, too, which leads us to another clue: Angua specifically took the way out of Ankh-Morpork that would be masked best by other scents. So, at the very least, we can guess that she doesn&#8217;t want to be followed. I&#8217;m not sure that I buy Vimes&#8217;s theory, that she just needed to get away for a while. She&#8217;s done that before! This feels way more serious, and given that her family and Uberwald are part of the story, it&#8217;s got to be something bigger. Right???<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/youtu.be\/TXFR-IPMdHo?a<\/p>\n<p><b>Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n<p>-\u00c2\u00a0<strong>In the very near future, these are going away. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markoshiro.com\">Please visit my new site that will act as a portal for all announcements<\/a>. If you&#8217;d rather not have to rely on checking a website regularly, <a href=\"http:\/\/eepurl.com\/ey636\">sign up for my newsletter instead<\/a>! This will cover all news for Mark Reads, Mark Watches, and Mark&#8217;s fiction career.\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the fourth part of\u00c2\u00a0The Fifth Elephant, everything gets MORE MYSTERIOUS. Intrigued? Then it&#8217;s time for Mark to read\u00c2\u00a0Discworld.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[463,248,527],"class_list":["post-4147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-the-fifth-elephant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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