11 December 2025

Charlie Mackesy’s rules for life

These stories about a boy and his animal friends reveal the futility of trying to foresee what will happen to us

“‘The storm is making me tired,’ said the boy. ‘I know,’ said the horse, ‘but storms get tired too.’”

There are plenty of storms raging at present, but they will not last. Tomorrow is another day. The insight of the horse goes deeper: it is not only the menacing thunder of war and the gathering rumble of economic collapse that is tiring. The inward search for an end to the tumult is even more exhausting. Tales of sunlit uplands beyond the horizons give scant shelter to the windswept and lost. Theories that posit dark forces behind the blast will lead you further into the tempest. Best forget the stories; meander on together and you may find the journey itself worthwhile.

The dialogue between the boy and the horse comes from Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm, published in October 2025 as a sequel to his huge bestseller The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2019). A cartoonist, painter, illustrator and Instagram devotee, Mackesy produced a book – or one emerged spontaneously from within him – unlike any other. Presented in irregular, uneven handwriting, with words curving around sketches of the characters wandering through a sparsely drawn landscape, often on pages that are mostly empty and white, the text and the format are as one. There is no storyline. As the boy and his friends travel on, their dialogues are the purpose of their journey. As Mackesy writes in the introduction to this equally remarkable second volume, “It’s about four unlikely friends who have no idea where they are going or what they are looking for…”

No plan or purpose unites the four animals – for the boy, too, belongs in the animal kingdom – as they travel together. Each of them embodies a different way of being in the world. The mole follows the way of unceasing pleasure in simple things: “Cake is usually the answer.” Guarded and wary, the fox treads on ground he does not trust; but it is the fox that tells the boy that they cannot get lost so long as they love one another. The horse accepts the world, serene in the knowledge that even as it is regularly covered by clouds there is always light beyond: “The blue sky above never leaves.” The boy is open to whatever presents itself, ready to explore, but also vulnerable. The vistas he sees around him are exciting, tempting and daunting. Sustained by his curiosity and the kindness of his companions, he presses on, finding adventure and fulfilment in rambling with no destination in mind.

In Mackesy’s books there are no thrilling yarns. The absence of plot is the point. Relieving the reader of the burden of seeking any conclusion, they suggest a way of living that lets things come and go as they will. These are not sagas of heroism and courage in a battle against evil of the sort we find in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. No masterful wizard leads the humble band to any kind of triumph. The landscape they traverse shows no traces of Aslan, the divine lion and saviour figure, who sacrifices himself only to be miraculously resurrected in CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia – a fairy-tale rendition of a Christian myth. Mackesy’s tales are not parables of human rebellion against cosmic tyranny akin to that told in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, where secular Gnosticism – the belief in emancipation through knowledge that is the fading faith of the age – is recycled as anti-Christian allegory. In giving succour without doctrine, Mackesy’s diptych is uniquely delightful, an innovation in children’s books and an event in literature.

By late 2022, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse had sold over two million copies in the UK alone – the bestselling hardback in British publishing history – and quickly went on to be translated into dozens of languages. Named Waterstones’ and Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year (2019), it was adapted into a BBC/Apple TV animated film which won an Academy Award in 2023. Though marketed as a children’s book, it was seized on by adults – hospital patients and soldiers coping with PTSD, among others – looking for respite from trauma. Timing certainly played a part. Appearing just before the Covid pandemic, it fell easily into the genre of therapeutic self-help books, an antidote to the isolation and dread from which so many suffered during lockdown. The sequel has, so far, attracted less attention. Yet it is just as extraordinary – an enchanting tale in which very little happens, which makes meaning and beauty from what seems to be practically nothing.

Some have dubbed Mackesy’s books “comfort literature” and compared them with AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), but the analogy is misleading. Milne’s book was first and last an analgesic, which served to deaden the sense of loss inflicted by the First World War. Like Mackesy’s, it features animal characters that embody human archetypes: Eeyore’s lugubrious gloom, Piglet’s anxious timidity, Pooh’s uncontrollable appetite and inexhaustible fondness for honey. A larger cast – Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Kanga and Roo – illustrate the limitations of intellect without understanding. Among the animals, the “bear of very little brain” may be the wisest. But there the similarities end. In Milne’s world, the guiding figure is a human being wiser than his age, Christopher Robin, an avatar of Milne’s son, who presides over animals he knew in childhood as stuffed toys. In Mackesy’s world there is no assumption of superior human authority: the animating figure is a horse, the boy a seeker and learner who does not stand above or apart from his animal kin. Literal-minded critics resist what they call the anthropomorphising of animals: Mackesy de-anthropomorphises humans. Nor are his books coming-of-age stories in which the human protagonists become fully formed individuals as they wrestle with difficulty and danger. Always childlike, Mackesy’s characters – like his readers – will never really grow up.

The most fundamental difference between Milne and Mackesy is in the landscapes their characters inhabit. The jaunts of Winnie-the-Pooh and his playfellows occur in a pastoral arcadia, the Hundred Acre Wood, a place evoking safety and nostalgia. The wood is their ancestral home. In contrast, Mackesy’s characters remain forever in no-man’s land, and it is this that they make their home. Where Milne sought to escape the uncharted openness of the human world, Mackesy accepts and embraces it.

Happily, Mackesy’s books do not offer consolation to their readers. That is the key to their charm. One of the symptoms of the anxiety of our time is the popularity of a reprocessed Stoicism – the idea that, while you cannot control the events that happen to you, you can control how you think about them. Marcus Aurelius’s funereal Meditations, in which the weary Roman emperor (AD 121-180) struggles to resign himself to his place in the universe through calming thoughts of death, have been revived as a kind of literary psychotherapy. If it helps, fine – but there is very little joy in this philosophy. More an epitaph than anything else, it is a way of looking back on life, not of living it.

In The Consolation of Philosophy, written over the course of a year in which he was awaiting execution in prison on a charge of treason brought by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great, the last Roman philosopher Boethius (AD 480-524) presented a Christianised Stoicism in the form of reflections on the transience of life and the fickleness of fortune. One must hope his conversations on determinism, providence and free will with Lady Philosophy, whom he imagines visiting him in his cell, fortified him against his fate. But the convoluted exchanges in which the philosopher tries to make sense of his life are notably unconvincing. A smile would have been a better way of saying goodbye.

The secret of Mackesy’s books is that they offer release from the struggle of trying to control one’s life or thoughts. When they can’t see any way ahead, he gently suggests, his readers should simply take another step. Like the four wayfarers of whom he writes, they have no journey’s end. The storm within is trying to map out your life in advance. Let it pass, and you can travel on.

Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm
Charlie Mackesy
Ebury Press, 128pp, £22

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[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]