Achtung Baby!

There exists a huge swathe of recurring motifs in Doctor Who fiction. Charitably these might be regarded as conventions of the genre... or more cynically, as retreading of familiar ground. To take two pseudorandom examples: maybe once a year there's an out-of-context return appearance for a mature Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and with about the same frequency we see the Doctor take a step beyond the metaphorical and directly encounter the most identifiable malignant force in recent history: Nazis. The Shadow in the Glass fulfils our quote of both criteria for 2001.

Thus the novel runs the risk of over-familiarity from the start - UFOs over England, citizens subsequently acting out-of-character, even the perennial question of whether Hitler might have survived the second World War; the details change, but the ethos and explanations are familiar. However, The Shadow in the Glass covers up its rather limited objectives so well, particularly in the absorbing set-up, that it's never obvious that it hasn't really said anything new.

Like last month's Rags, this is a horrific story largely set in and around the villages of south-west England. However, partly due to the deployment of the darker sixth Doctor, there is little of the mismatch of medium and content than we saw last time around - at least for most of the book's length. Things do become less credible toward the end, as the story runs out of momentum rather: predictably ticking off clearly delineated boxes, switching time and place a little too often, and with increasingly regular shifts of tone becoming a little difficult to accept. Even accepting the intention to remind us all that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were the work of human beings rather than monsters, it remains hard to reconcile the Doctor's jocular mood and the Brigadier's reluctant mourning of Nazi deaths with the atrocities both have repeatedly witnessed.

I hope this is the last WW2/Nazi story for quite some time, though. They have been rather over-used, their evil in danger of being taken for granted. And that can never be acceptable.