Hundred Acre Wood was a very safe world, and the creatures in it were reassuring. ‘It was 1926, people were back from the cataclysm of war, and what was needed was literature that was safe and comforting. ‘It hit the mood when it was written,’ says Hunt. Like Mackesy’s debut, Milne’s first Pooh book was also released at a time of global upheaval. ‘There are a couple of Mackesy’s pictures which are very much tributes to Shepard,’ agrees Peter Hunt, Professor Emeritus in English and Children's Literature at Cardiff University, who points out that The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse conjures the same notion of a golden world of childhood that Milne’s Pooh books did so well.īut the parallels between The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse and Winnie the Pooh extend beyond their illustrations. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books, which were originally illustrated by E.H. Mackesy’s online reviewers suggest that his book is a touchstone to be returned to - they say they keep it on their bedside table for that very reason - and several compare his illustrations and outlook to that of A.A. ‘I have felt quite fragile lately and this book filled me with hope’ ‘a companion to help me through all it is to be a living being in this life’ ‘it is a slice of calm in this hectic and mad world’ and ‘I've felt more at peace today having read it than I have for such a very long time’.
Readers no longer needed the disasters explaining to them, they needed a hug.Īnd what The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse undoubtedly offers is comfort. Macksey’s book has racked up more than 83,000 reviews on, and thousands of reviews, many of them heartfelt, many of them similarly inspired.
In the late-2010s, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiensexperienced an unlikely sales boom, becoming a poster-child for the broader boom in high-minded, serious non-fiction that helped readers navigate a world that seemed increasingly besieged by political turmoil and climate change.įast-forward a few years to the end of the decade and the landscape had taken a palpable turn for the worse: beyond a global pandemic, there were threats of nuclear conflict, the #MeToo movement, the uncertainty of Brexit, international flooding and forest fires and, on a more intimate scale, a vehemently partisan social media and the disconcerting impact of online surveillance and security. What we read in times of national and global turbulence can be telling. ‘I held those two pages very close during the darkest moments of my life,’ Fish says. Fish cites two of the most popular images, in which the Horse and the Boy cite the power of asking for help. He was experiencing suicidal thoughts having been signed off work after suffering from years of workplace harassment, but remembered the messages of Mackesy’s paintings at his 2018 exhibition. John Fish, another reader, tells me the book has saved his life. ‘It has given me strength, encouragement, laughter and a voice in the hardest of times.’ ‘It’s as if manages to put into words all the jumbled thoughts I am carrying in my head and jumbled feelings in my heart,’ she says. Ritchie says the book continues to help on her healing journey, and she finds herself reaching for it often. ‘It was so refreshingly simple, uncomplicated and fresh.’ People have found The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse a balm and an uplift. Lynsey Ritchie was given the book when she was half-way through 15 rounds of chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Mackesy’s drawings and words, which encouraged kindness and support, found their way onto the sides of buildings people were getting his characters tattooed on their bodies. And yet, in the final dark months of 2019, the tremulous beginning of 2020 and the swirling chaos of the pandemic year, it offered hope to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s not aimed at any clear audience, and works as well for eight-year-olds as it does octogenarians. The four titular characters meet one another and share each other’s confidence.
Rather than a linear narrative, it’s a collection of quiet musings and conversations.
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse isn’t a conventional picture book. Two years after release, and Mackesy's book is the longest-running Sunday Times hardback chart-topper to date. What nobody realised, then, was that this was the start of what would become the surprise hit of the year. Someone commented that the image took them ‘right back to the feel of my own storybook childhood’, another joked that the boy and the mole were discussing politics. Another mole day I think,’ the artist captioned it. The boy looks young, barely a toddler, barely the size of the mole, and the mole looks slightly concerned it adds to the cuteness. Three years ago, Charlie Mackesy uploaded a drawing of a boy and a mole to his Instagram account.
0 kommentar(er)
