The Cage by Lloyd Jones

The Cage
Lloyd Jones (2018)
Bolinda Audio
Read by Amos Phillips

Strangers. They’ve experienced an inexplicable trauma, arrive without documentation and cannot explain who they are. No birth certificates, passports or ID. We want to help them but how do we know we can trust them? Without documentation, substantiated history, how do we know their true purpose? Keep them detained- to protect us, to protect them. Until…

The Cage by Lloyd Jones tells this initially innocent tale that becomes more and more immoral as the story progresses. The protagonist is a reliable yet naïve narrator and the reader joins him in observing the happenings from a distance. But at what point should our storyteller stop observing and intervene? At what point should we?
 
The allegory Jones writes is expertly woven into a fictional account set in a small country town. The community is tight and cooperative. They create and follow protocols as they incarcerate two distressed and suffering strangers who cannot explain themselves adequately for the townspeople. The reader is positioned to wonder what they hope to achieve with this cage and for how long the ordeal will last.