Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 bestseller The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse offered such outrageously marketable truisms – the kind of comforting and occasionally cloying little captions and cute drawings about vulnerability and kindness that parents often like to stick above toddlers’ beds – that readers might have viewed it with more cynicism had it not had such a sweet and evidently genuine back story.
Mackesy was an unlikely Instagram star. The writer and illustrator had a bucolic childhood in the Northumberland countryside, among horses, dogs, chickens and pigs. “I didn’t quite understand people,” the endearingly scruffy Mackesy would later tell Country Living, a magazine he describes as being a staple growing up. As an adult, he had a successful but low-key career for many years: a cartoonist for The Spectator; a book illustrator for the Oxford University Press. This was not a man seemingly bent on ambition or destined for millionaire stardom.
But in 2018, on an Instagram account previously devoted to family snaps and the occasional gently lewd cartoon, he started posting beautiful little ink and watercolour drawings featuring, at first, a little boy hugging a mole, then other animals too, with captions alongside about self-love, friendship and positivity. In a world still reeling from Brexit and fraught global politics, they struck a chord.
One went viral: “‘What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?’ asked the boy. ‘Help,’ said the horse.” Mackesy, always quick online to thank his supporters for their attention, started to receive letters telling him NHS staff were using his work to help patients with mental health issues. Army veterans said it was useful for PTSD; schools sent him notes from teachers and students inspired by his optimism. His followers shot up into the tens of thousands, he began to sell prints of his work and a publisher spotted him.
Those drawings became the book sensation published in October 2019, which has since sold more than ten million copies worldwide and been translated into 50 languages. Original prints of the famous quartet are now auctioned for thousands of pounds by Bonhams. In 2023, an animated short film based on the book and voiced by actors including Idris Elba – which had aired on BBC One on Christmas Eve 2022 – won an Oscar.
And now there is a sequel: Always Remember: the Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm follows the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse, again journeying through nowhere in particular, this time with a storm brewing.
Again it has the barest of narratives, and offers similar words of wisdom: conversations amongst the itinerant friends such as: “‘What’s the most precious thing you’ve been given?’ ‘Time,’ said the horse.” Mumsnet, Reddit and other internet forums are already awash with super fans clamouring for signed copies. It looks set to be a similar success. All thanks to those modest little Instagram scribbles.
It didn’t hurt of course that Mackesy was already an illustrator with some friends in high places. The adventurer Bear Grylls was an old school pal from Radley College; the Oscar-nominated actor Carey Mulligan was also a friend. In 2018, as Mackesy’s Insta fame was creeping up, Mulligan publicly credited his drawings with helping her overcome panic attacks while acting in the play Girls & Boys at London’s Royal Court.
But even if you are the type of person who feels they are somewhat allergic to aphorisms, and even if he had a celebrity leg-up, there is an authenticity both to Mackesy’s humility and to his work that rings true. Always Remember opens with a note to the reader in Mackesy’s familiar slightly messy inked scrawl, just as the first book did.
“Hello,” he starts. “…I’m writing this in a grubby room surrounded by spilt ink, half-finished cups of tea, scrumpled drawings, pens with broken nibs, and a good dose of fear and self-doubt that I will ever make this book at all. If you are reading this then somehow I did … I’ve always loved sharing drawings but never thought I’d make a book of them. Now I’ve made another which is daunting, but I try to imagine one person who feels lighter for it. Maybe this is you.”
Mackesy is big on the idea of embracing mistakes in a way that feels reminiscent of Elizabeth Day, creator of the wildly popular podcast How to Fail. Indeed, his first book features pages where the dog has trotted across the manuscript and blurred the ink, and elsewhere a page imprinted with the stain from a mug of tea. Perfectionism is the enemy; self-love is the goal.
Mackesy, now 62, with two million Instagram followers but still living a simple life shuffling with his dog Barney (who inspired the mole) between his flat in Brixton, London and his late mother’s home in Suffolk, seems bemused by his success, and genuinely invested in the sayings his creations hold dear.
He made that early drawing about asking for help at a time when he had lost a friend – “When things make you think harder about what really matters,” he told The Guardian in 2019 – and said the characters represent different parts of his own personality, his own struggles through life. “Maybe I feel too much,” he admitted to Country Living.
If you too are the type of person who feels “too much”, you are probably also the type of person who wants to buy his books and maybe buy multiple copies for friends as well. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse holds the record for the most consecutive weeks in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Chart, is a New York Times bestseller and was a Waterstones book of the year, with booksellers across the country reporting buyers frequently purchasing more than one copy for friends.
Timing was almost certainly a factor in Mackesy’s original success. In a Britain blighted by post-Brexit factions and, later, pandemic isolation, the book’s determined but gentle positivity was a boon to those struggling. The new book feels like it knows it is emerging into a yet darker, more divided world. Again, the boy and his animal friends wander through changing fields and forests like the characters in Michael Rosen’s We’re Going On a Bear Hunt, clinging to each other with no idea where they are headed. The landscapes feel darker and more desolate than in the first book. Mackesy leans into that. “‘The storm is making me tired,’ said the boy. ‘I know ..’ said the horse. ‘…but storms get tired too.’”
The idea is not individual evolution or growth, but acceptance and hopefulness. Arguably there is a greater appetite for action over acceptance in the current political landscape than several years ago, but promoting kindness is never going to be unpopular. Even if they are not your thing Mackesy’s books never feel like a cash grab. There is a gentleness and candour to him, and to them, that will continue to appeal.
Despite being a picture book and despite its clear similarities to other books featuring friendships between children and animals, such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Mackesy’s work has always felt directed more towards adults than children. Effusive online reviews describe adults buying the books for each other, not for their kids, much like James Norbury’s bestseller Big Panda Tiny Dragon, a very similar and equally beautifully illustrated book (“based on Buddhist philosophy”, it was published in 2021 and has since sold more than 300,000 copies and spawned a sequel, The Journey). These are more self-help than bedtime story.
The main nod to younger readers is the mole’s obsession with cake, an amusing characteristic that offsets the seriousness of all that wisdom and that is marginally ramped up in the new book. “Don’t leave today the cake you could eat tomorrow,” says the mole, who adds that he once got lost in a cake shop, and also that cake “is usually the answer”.
Mackesy himself acknowledged in the first book that it was something he hoped “you can dip into anywhere”, and indeed, I suspect many older readers will find the new book more palatable taken a little bit at a time, without any expectation of story. The odd page can feel, in the right moment, wonderfully warm and wise (“One day you’ll look back and realise how hard it was and just how well you did” will surely prove particularly popular) but all 128 pages in one go is like, well, eating too much cake.
‘Always Remember: the Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm’ is published by Ebury Press on 9 October
