Arctangential

I finished The Wine of Dreams this morning. It wasn’t exactly great literature, but it wasn’t bad either — I continue to buy these Warhammer novels because they’re reasonably entertaining and they go quickly.

This one is about a young man named Reinmar Weiland, the son of a wine merchant in a small city on the border of an empire. He’s bored working in a wine shop, and wishing there was more excitement in his life. As is typical in these sorts of tales, he gets his wish and then regrets it. A visitor to the shop identifies himself as Reinmar’s father’s cousin, and asks to purchase some “dark wine”. The man leaves in anger, and is shortly thereafter followed by an Imperial witch-hunter, looking for the man. Suspicion is cast on Reinmar’s family, even though they don’t sell the proscribed dark wine, or “Wine of Dreams”, and so to keep him out of trouble, his father sends him on an early purchasing trip to the surrounding wineries.

On this trip, as expected, Reinmar learns the truth about dark wine, the role of the gypsies, and some dark history about his own family. In investigating the source of dark wine, he unwittingly sparks off a long-brewing war between the forces of evil and the town in which he lives. He gets back to town just in time to participate in its defense, and to fight the hidden evils in his own family, re-risen to strike down the town. Of course he ends up saving the day, etc, although since this is a Warhammer novel, the overall picture at the end of the book is significantly bleaker than it was at the beginning, and while they may have won the battle, the war is almost certainly to be lost.

I’m now reading Ian McEwan’s The Innocents, which I am liking pretty good so far.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.