Tedium sets in quickly. No slight was too trivial to be remembered, resented and recorded by the prince
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Spare is a slog.
Prince Harry is very famous, but his life is not very interesting. His ideas less so. Yet, having written about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I felt professionally obligated to read, as the Sussexes would put it, “their truth.”
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The reviews have not been kind. The BBC reviewer was dismissive, calling it the “longest angry drunk text ever sent.” Other reviews were savage, ridiculing Harry for thinking that his dead mother sends him messages in the form of animals.
Tedium sets in quickly. On almost every page there is someone being mean to Harry. No slight is too trivial to be remembered, resented, recorded and written down. At one point, even the Imperial State Crown, despite its evident elegance, torments Harry. It’s caged up in the Tower of London, not free as ordinary crowns are to wander the bright sunlit uplands, a metaphor for Harry’s lot in life.
Comedy can relieve the boredom. Jokes about his accounts of the frostbitten family jewels — not the ones in the Tower — almost write themselves: Harry demanded privacy so that he could publicly describe his private parts …
On almost every page there is someone being mean to Harry
“At all costs, I avoided sitting quietly with a book,” he writes about his teenage years, instead “memorizing long passages of Ace Ventura.” Later, after meeting Meghan, who mentions a book that she is reading, he explains, at age 32: “Sorry. Not really big on books.”
That someone who doesn’t read would have the fastest-selling book in history is simply hilarious.
I invented a game to pass the time, trying to identify what words or phrasings could not possibly have come from Harry, but were invented out of whole cloth by the ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer. “Vertiginous”? Harry was a pilot, though, so perhaps. In any case, Harry recorded the audio book, which means he had to learn how to pronounce even the words he didn’t know.
As the tome dragged on, I suspected that Moehringer had written the entire book in a sort of code, undermining Harry even as it gave vent to his whingeing, with the ghost knowing that the principal was too daft to see through the draft. Moehringer littered the text with obvious mistakes, easily fact-checked.
Moehringer littered the text with obvious mistakes
For example, as anyone who has visited King’s College, Cambridge — or looked it up on Wikipedia — ought to know, there is no direct line of descendants from King Henry VI. So when Moehringer has Harry saying that Eton was founded by his “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather,” he is revealing him as ignorant of basic royal history. Not even Henry VIII was a direct descendant of Henry VI, and Henry VIII’s line ran out with Elizabeth I.
Why repeatedly undermine Harry in his own “auto”-biography? It’s as if Moehringer wants to caution us against accepting anything Harry says as true.
Constant, unremitting drug use — cannabis, cocaine, psychedelics — marked Harry’s life from his teens onward. Settling in to his new home in Montecito in 2020, Harry lights up a joint. So when Moehringer includes Harry’s doubts about his own memory, is he warning us that at many points, Harry was too drunk or too high to be a reliable witness?
It is not just the obvious contradictions that plague the perpetually aggrieved prince, such as fretting about security while gratuitously writing about Taliban kills, an unnecessary detail that could inflame those who might wish him harm.
It’s that Harry, in Moehringer’s depiction, has no grasp of reality.
Harry, in Moehringer’s depiction, has no grasp of reality
“I wanted to prevent a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family 23 years earlier, and from which we were still trying to recover,” Harry writes of the Sandringham Summit about police protection after “Megxit.” Has he no notion that the family, beginning with King Charles III, has moved from strength to strength after Diana’s death?
Moehringer includes in the epilogue the funeral of Her Late Majesty last September. But he opens those pages with Harry taking Meghan to visit Diana’s grave at Althorp just prior to Queen Elizabeth’s death. It was the 25th anniversary of her death in Paris with Dodi Fayed. It was Meghan’s first time.
Six years after meeting Meghan, four years after marrying her, Harry had never taken her to visit his mother’s grave. Did Moehringer not tell Harry that it undermined the previous 400 pages about the supreme importance of Diana’s life and death — and afterlife, as Harry consults soothsayers to communicate with her?
Moehringer ensures that we know that Harry’s hold on reality, the truth of things, is tenuous at best. The duke’s drug use moved on from recreational drug use to “medicinal” use of psychedelics, which “let me redefine reality.”
“Under the influence of these substances I was able to let go of rigid preconcepts, to see that there was another world beyond my heavily filtered senses, a world that was equally real and doubly beautiful,” Harry explains. “There was only truth. After the psychedelics wore off my memory of that world would remain: This is not all there is.”
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The drug-addled bibliophobe then ventures into metaphysics.
“All the great seers and philosophers say our daily life is an illusion,” he writes. “I always felt the truth in that. But how reassuring it was, after nibbling a mushroom, on ingesting ayahuasca, to experience it for myself.”
All great philosophers think our ordinary life is an illusion? Moehringer had to know that not’s true. From Aristotle up until Descartes, it’s quite safe to say that most thought the exact opposite. Is Moehringer telling us that Harry doesn’t know anything about anything?
Harry doesn’t know Harry himself, which is a sad thing for an autobiography to reveal. He has a minimal self-awareness; he knows that he “texts like a teenager,” which is how he first courted the then 35-year-old Meghan. He always up to join the lads to play video games or drink copious amounts of tequila. Yet he has no idea how unpleasant those closest to him find his company.
Spare’s most pathetic paragraphs are his account of moving into Nottingham Cottage, the former home of “Willy and Kate.” The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had moved elsewhere in the Kensington Palace complex.
He has no idea how unpleasant those closest to him find his company
“They were half a football pitch away,” Harry writes. “I assumed they’d have me over any minute now. Any day. But day after day it didn’t happen.”
Why would they? Harry’s own account of those days was that he would return from work, eat takeout over the sink, watch endless episodes of Friends, and smoke weed, hoping not to disturb his neighbour, the elderly Duke of Kent. Who would want such a superficial, bad influence in a home with young children?
Harry laments his estrangement from his brother, apparently oblivious that his own strangeness might be the principal cause, and that marrying a woman estranged from her own family likely would not improve matters.
I previously thought that the royals were prepared to cut Harry off to protect the family — the Firm — as when the Queen kept her favourite Uncle David (Edward VIII, latterly the Duke of Windsor) at a proper constitutional distance. After reading Spare, it is more likely that the Queen seized the opportunity to get rid of a grandson who was alternately annoying and exasperating.
Harry has bet his future on Meghan in Montecito. Celebrity life in Hollywood is not traditionally conducive to marital stability, with or without the need to maintain media interest to generate income. Both Harry and Meghan are children of divorce, and Meghan has already been divorced once, so one expects that this chapter of Harry’s life will be considerably shorter than his book. And if Spare is any indication, Harry will be the last to know it.
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