As the Fifteenth Doctor would probably say, “Oh, YES, honey!”

The previous Fifth Doctor novel and audiobook, Ruby Red, was gorgeously written by Georgia Cook, and read with an unfortunate beginner’s monotone by Millie Gibson, who plays Ruby Sunday in the current iteration of on-screen Doctor Who.

Gibson’s young and very new to the audiobook game, which could well explain the issues with her interpretation of the text.

Here in Caged, you have two altogether more experienced hands at work, and the quality shines through both in the writing and in the performance, as Bonnie Langford steps in to read Una McCormack’s tale of complicated dynamics between species and the ethics of alien abduction.

The Doctor and Ruby arrive on a supposedly uninhabited planet, one that’s never yet seen any complex life arise. 

You don’t need us to tell you that that’s a wiiiiiildly inaccurate supposition, right?

In particular, the planet is home to two seeming species – a kind of small metal armadillo, and a kind of larger, intelligent…guinea pig.

The guinea pigs (which clearly aren’t guinea pigs, but show all the familiar characteristics of the breed), live and love and work and play in close family and tribal groups, but have become seized with the notion that they are the only intelligent life in the universe.

Until one of them, Chirracharr, is abducted by aliens, investigated in a cold white laboratory by creatures with big sad eyes, and then returned.

Naturally, nobody believes her stories. They’re the only people in the universe, how could there be aliens to do the abducting? Where would they come from? What would they possibly want?

Chirracharr sets off on an adventure to the high mountains of her world – where she and all her people have an innate fear of going – to see if she can find proof that aliens are real.

Annnnd then she meets the Doctor and Ruby.

It’s worth putting on record that Chirracharr is one of the loveliest people created as a one-shot companion for a long while in Doctor Who, and given the recent infusion of Disney money, we’d wholeheartedly support her joining the TV Tardis crew in some kind of 3D animated form. That’s not just because she’s a large intelligent guinea pig (though as Ruby acknowledges to herself, “it would be a struggle not to cuddle her”), or because she’s voiced with an adorable squeakiness by Bonnie Langford, who can absolutely do this kind of thing in her sleep, but instead gives it all her considerable professionalism.

No – it’s because Chirrachar is one of those people like Jo Grant or Sarah Jane Smith – someone who embodies in their own world and setting the very best nature of the Doctor themselves. She’s kind, welcoming, wants to make contact with new things and new people, and only through adversity and necessity discovers that some things must be fought, and that she has the claws to do the fighting.

So in Chirracharr, her experiences and her nature, you have the basis of the first great strand of storytelling in Caged. Has she really been abducted by aliens, and if so, what could they want with her? Chirracharr is convinced that she has, and sets out bravely to discover whatever answers await her.

Then, for an equally strong second strand, we’re introduced to Tixlel.

Tixlel?

Mm-hmm – they’re head of research on a project in trouble. It would be spoilerific to tell you too much about the project, because that’s a central mystery in the course of the book, but Tixlel is one of the octopoidal Ix, and they (all the Ix are described with gender-neutral pronouns, which in itself is a gorgeous touch) have a problem.

Their secret research project has been discovered, following unsporting leaks by some other, as yet unknown, Ix, and the protestors are at the gates. In fact, there are several strands of protesters at the gates. There are those who’ve discovered there’s a massive secret project underway, who are just angry it’s been kept from them. There are those who believe – as with most secret government projects – that the scientists have been consorting with aliens. And there are those who recognise that the Ix are facing a crushing housing crisis, and simply want the vast tracts of planet on which Tixlel’s multi-generational research project is conducted to be used for new homes for the Ix.

The Ix, much like Chirracharr’s people, believe they’re the only intelligent people in the universe.

Annnnnd then, Tixlel meets Ruby and the Doctor.

What McCormack does here is weave the strands od the Ix and Chirracharr’s people together in a measured, well-paced way that keeps you turning pages or listening to chapters, everything making a sort of sense early on, to hook you in, but evolving and advancing into a proper conflict over time, not only between the Ix and Chirracharr’s people, but between mindsets and ways of seeing the world – the choice between insularity and expansiveness, fear of change and embrace of wider universes. If you were looking for a candidate for Most Wholesome Doctor Who Story of the 21st Century, you could do worse than put your money on McCormack’s tale.

While there’s plenty for both Ruby and the Doctor to do, especially after they get expertly separated to explore separate strands of the story, there’s a real sense here that it’s the story of the Ix and of Chirracharr’s people, and that the time travellers mostly play the role of catalysts for advanced action. 

While Ruby threatens to reveal her alien self to the insular Ix protestors, the Doctor gets hands-on with a cheery metal armadillo he calls Fred (a development which could only have been bettered if first, he’d called it Romanadvoratrelundar), stopping a kind of corporate invasion of the world on which Chirracharr’s people are the indigenous inhabitants.

McCormack’s writing is such that you can overlay any of several morals on it, as they please you – the power of the rich and powerful to dictate and destroy the lives of the poor and powerless (with the Doctor and Ruby standing between them), the complexity of situations beyond how they seem from given points of view and through certain prisms, or, most powerfully of all, that sense of a battle of mindsets, between the insular, which leads towards destruction, and the open, which leads to new connections and friendships.

What you have in Caged though is ultimately a beautifully written Doctor Who story that merges some of the best Classic Who settings and dilemmas with a thoroughly modern, spankingly fresh New Who take on those ongoing problems. 

Written with depth, clarity, and above all, hope, and performed by Bonnie Langford at the height of her interpretative powers, Caged has all the complexity you could wish for, all the drama you’d expect, but it leaves you, ultimately, with a satisfied sense of sheer pleasure, and of optimistic joy that there are, right here on Earth, and potentially spread all across the cosmos, people with a Doctorish turn of mind, so everything might just be all right in the end.

Most especially if you decide to be one of them – as Caged will encourage you to be. Tony Fyler