Lords and Ladies

Lords and Ladies Terry Pratchett *****(av 5)

The elves are back. The forests whisper and the stars are glowing. There’s singing in the glades and unicorns in the meadows, and crop circles in the fields.
It’s Midsummer Night.
No time for dreaming.

Grandma Weatherwax and her crumbling coven faces their worse challenge ever. The elves are back and they want the world again, with the humans to live and die by their whim. But how do you fight a people so beautiful, so wise, so happy, so rightfully our Lords and Ladies? After all, they brought beauty and magic back (and it is corrupting us), they are singing in the moonlight (about killing humans), the unicorns are prowling the glades (it’s a bloody big mad horse with a point in one end!)

You fight them with Lancer iron, with wizards and orang-utans and the worlds second-biggest lover (he’s a dwarf, see?) and the indomitable will of the witches of Lanker. Because if it’s something you can say about witches, it’s that they don’t fight fair.

Still, it might take a power greater than even Grandma Weatherwax to manage a people who can’t be killed, but where do you find someone more powerful than the Elven Queen, a creature who can go into your mind and make you love her? Where you least expect it…

This is my favourite Pratchett, and the one book I mostly need to come down from the lofty heights of Tolkien. It’s also the one book that mostly divide the PECS – society, because these elves torture, trick, lie and murder humans. They’re not only inhuman, they are vicious, evil, cruel!
Still, they’re elves, and Pratchett got that right; they do something to your memory…(But they’re wonderful! They create wonders. They’re glamorous! They project glamour. They’re terrific! They beget terror...)

Quote:
“Take my hand, child,” the Elven Queen said.
She struck out her hand gingerly.
There was something wrong with the queens eyes . It wasn’t the shape, or the colour. There were no evil glint. But there was…a look.
It was such a look as a microbe might encounter, if it was to look up the bottom end of the microscope. It said: you are nothing. It said: you’re an animal. It said: your flawed, you have no value. It said: you will never be as strong, as beautiful, as wise as we are. It said: you might be pet, or you might be quarry. It said: and the choice isn’t yours.