Most of the time with audiobooks of Doctor Who novels, the text and the reading work together as one, adding drama and emotion to the work as it exists on the page.

And then, just occasionally, they don’t.

Before we go much further, it’s worth putting this on record. What Georgia Cook has delivered in Ruby Red is a pretty glorious Doctor Who story. It has a lot of semi-classic Doctoring, but just enough of the Ncuti Gatwa incarnation to make it sparkle with the newly-recognizable style of the latest Doctor.

It has an escalating threat that grows more complex as the story develops, especially given the Doctor’s moral relativism over which deadly creatures deserve their chance to live in the universe, what constitutes punishment, and how you navigate the maze of morality when fear and panic threatens to take hold of all around you.

There are some solid staples, like the Doctor and Ruby arriving on the scene to answer a distress beacon, and a young person uncertain about their path while under pressure from family and society both.

That’s also a neatly New Who touch – it’s quite possible to see that element as an allegory of the dilemma still faced by too many LGBTQIA+ young people who feel the need to be their true selves, while everything and everyone they know is telling them to conform to a socially accepted pathway.

In a way that feels important after only one short series of TV stories, there’s room here in which Ruby Sunday can breathe and bring her own skills to the party – in particular, caring for the central teenager and helping her explore the options of her life. And she also faces her solid share of companion peril on both the precursor to a battlefield and an insufficiently frozen lake – not to mention red-eyed slavering wolves and grey-tentacled psychic supervillains with a gazillion eyes.

Above all, though, there’s some solid “alien historical” work here, taking us into a time and a place very few will know too well, and using real historical events as a backdrop for high-stakes alien rites and wars.

So, let’s be clear – Ruby Red is a belter of a Doctor Who story.

It’s just one that works better in the written word than it does as an audiobook.

The reason for that feels positively treacherous to reveal. 

Millie Gibson – the embodiment of Ruby Sunday herself – is, as Series 1 amply proved, a good actress, with both guts, gusto, and a strong grasp of nuance and finesse.

Those are skills she brings to the dialogue sections of the Ruby Red audiobook, giving a wide range of characters sufficient differentiation to make the action come alive. Her take on the main alien villain in particular is reedy and creepy and interestingly at odds with how its physicality is described.

The in-between parts though – which in a novelization amount to quite a lot of the book – is where she currently falls down. 

Cook’s writing gives you lots of effective, evocative description, both of the scene of the battle in medieval Russia and of various episodes of peril. Again, the attack by possessed red-eyed wolves is an example of this – on the page, it’s quite the pulse-pounder. In Gibson’s reading though, the words lie down and die on the ear, the voice rarely embodying the words, and only infrequently rising beyond a monotone.

It gives us absolutely no pleasure to report this, and we’re not as keen to apportion blame as it might sound. Millie Gibson’s a) very young, and b) a successful actress – her career has largely been based on her ability to deliver believable embodiments of characters, at which, as we say, she shines here. 

Audiobook reading is largely a different skillset, and one that takes some time to master. There’s absolutely no reason to think she won’t become a highly favoured voice in Fifteenth Doctor audio novels.

But on this outing, there’s too much flatness to the reading to successfully move the listener along in between the dialogue sections.

The novel in hard copy works extremely well – which says only good things about Georgia Cook’s ability to frame, pace, and fill a Doctor Who story with punchy elements and strong hooks. By taking us to Lake Peipus in Russia in 1242, just a handful of heartbeats ahead of a battle between Estonian and Novgorod forces, almost everything we encounter is new to most 21st century readers.  

That works to keep us initially on the back foot when we encounter aliens who drop their teenagers off in someone else’s combat zone to prove their valour as a rite of passage. And when red-eyed wolves and humans start appearing, everything elevates with a pleasing storytelling momentum.

Family dynamics, ancient wars to the point of extinction, psychic possession, and some great visuals help keep us turning pages, and while there’s a certain optimistic inevitability to the resolution of teenager Ranavere’s story, very little else goes down predictable lines. It’s quite fun to imagine how other incarnations of the Doctor would have handled the same scenario – and the way you can tell it’s a solid Doctor Who story is that those ways come through pretty clearly. You can imagine many Doctors having this adventure, with the solutions and methods tweaked to their own particular tone.

But the Fifteenth Doctor is his own, radically different synthesis of essential Doctorness, and the way he works the solution is relatively straightforward – having weighed up the moralities involved, there’s a certain brazenness to his power here, a vibe of “I’m not having that, honey” that allows history to continue more or less unimpeded while avoiding a potentially world-ending alien threat.

All of this is by way of saying “Absolutely, go out and get Georgia Cook’s first Doctor Who novel.”

For now, at least, go get the hard copy version though. Millie Gibson was absolutely the natural choice to read this story. But just for now, the story’s served better by the voices in your own head as you read it. Tony Fyler