Children, meet the cuddliest alien in the universe

Telegraph

19-02-2025

Aliens have become notably cuddlier than they were in previous generations, when authors such as HG Wells played on the public's fear of extraterrestrial creatures colonising Earth. 'Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,' he wrote in The War of the Worlds (1898), 'regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.' But today's young reader is likely to have a more benign view of aliens, as children's authors increasingly cast them as benevolent creatures with emotions like our own.
Leo and Ralph, the third novel by the Australian author Peter Carnavas, is an enchanting example. The story centres on a young boy, Leo, and his best friend Ralph, an imaginary alien with 'long flappy ears' and 'arms and legs like soft pointy socks'. Leo and Ralph spend hours together, lost in a faraway world: 'They had lain on this blanket, staring at the sky, hundreds of times. Dreamt of planets with funny names, imagined the creatures that lived there and the spaceships they might fly…'
Leo is shy, and Ralph makes everything better. ('As soon as [he] arrived, school became less scary.') But when Leo's family moves to a new town, his parents, hoping he'll make actual friends, explain that Ralph must stay behind. Leo is bereft – until, soon after they move into their new home, Ralph reappears in his imagination. Can Leo keep his forbidden friend a secret? And how will Ralph feel when Leo finally makes friends with Gus, a boy who's very much real?
Carnavas began his career writing and illustrating picture books, including the much-loved Blue Whale Blues, about a whale with bicycle problems. But he's best known for his acclaimed debut novel, The Elephant (2017), about a young girl who sets out to shoo away her father's sadness, which she imagines as an enormous, invisible elephant following him around. Here, as in his previous books, Carnavas's skill is to use a tight-knit narrative as a vehicle for life's wider questions: 'The biggest thoughts that Leo had were about deep space, the never-ending expanse of emptiness beyond the blue sky. He couldn't stop thinking about the wild impossibility of it all.'
In the hands of a less accomplished novelist, such passages might sound pithy. But Carnavas is a wonderful, warm-hearted writer, and manages to filter every nugget of philosophy through the eyes of his child narrator. ('Ralph sat up. His voice was croaky. 'If a shooting star zoomed past right now, what would you wish for?' 'To find another friend like you.') Leo makes a deeply touching hero, to whose emotional ups and downs every reader is likely to relate. And yet it's Ralph who truly pulls at the heartstrings. He might be fiction's cuddliest alien yet.