Every weekend, I eagerly look forward to John Gray's articles. But these days, he is not regularly writing... and I miss his words.
Last weekend he did write and as usual a simple but yet a beautiful piece - thoughts on the book Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy.
“‘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.
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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.
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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.
As John Gray states - "These stories about a boy and his animal friends reveal the futility of trying to foresee what will happen to us."
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