Review of Spare by Prince Harry
By: Michael A. Arnold

This is the strangest book about the British royals in some time, maybe ever. Someone has already said that but it is true. I have not read a book quite like this before, and reading it just after its publication, seeing the reactions sprout up across the internet was really strange.

You already know who Prince Harry is, even if only vaguely. His father is the now king of the United Kingdom and his grandmother was the recently departed Queen Elizabeth II. He was always going to be famous, even if he lived recursively. Famous – but not well known, his life has been controversial. At the time of writing you can barely open a news site or turn on the TV without him being talked about or mentioned, at least here in Britain. The Netflix series with him and his wife Meghan Markle has been consistently recommended – I do not watch a lot of TV, but Penguin Random House published his book Spare on the 10th of January. Books are my territory. I had to check it out.

Looking back over its four hundred or so pages, the book is difficult to analyze intelligently. The first question to ask a memoir is: ‘what is the point this person is trying to make?’. This book is an attempt to justify to everyone, as he says himself in the prologue, why Harry stepped away from Royal life and decided to move (or ‘flee’ as he put it) to the United States. It was to get away from the British press, who have made his life miserable. It was also to get away from Royal processes and restrictions, as the last few chapters suggest he was increasingly isolated from other members of his family. Ultimately this book is as much about the culture inside ‘the palace’ as it is about the newspapers and their attitude to the royals. However, this book is incredibly sloppily structured. Events, memories and details seem to float by like blades of grass in the strong current of a stream, and not all of them have much of a purpose. If this book was only about the press and Harry’s relationship with his family, there are far too many odd details cluttering the narrative to make it a coherent whole.

So it is in part a memoir, in part a series of recollections. At times there is anger, making the book more of a rant than an argument, or a justification, Harry is trying to present to us. He is upset about how his life has gone and been affected by circumstance - things he does not seem to fully understand or have had contextualized. But it would be easy to call him stupid, as some people have, and this is not fair. He may not be a very clear thinker but he is not an idiot - despite errors in the text that we will get to.

Part of this might be because of how this book was written, or ghostwritten. What seems to have happened is: the ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, interviewed Harry over a number of days – and then rewrote his words into this book. Memory is never a perfect recollection of events. Biases and suggestion are known to affect memory in strange but powerful ways. This is something Harry even admits early in the book:


Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, … there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.

In other words, what is in this book might not be strictly true, but it is Harry’s truth. It is the truth as he remembers it and understands it.

However this ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, might not have been the best choice. There are factual errors that cannot be overlooked, and anecdotes that feel like lies. An example of an error occurs really early on, when Harry was at school just after the death of his mother Diana, he receives a Xbox gaming console as a birthday present. He states, and saying twice, this was in 1997 and he was 13. The Xbox would not exist for another four years, being designed in the year 2000 and released for sale in 2001. Perhaps Harry was thinking of a Playstation, the king of gaming consoles in the 1990s, and misremembered. If this is what happened, the ghostwriter simply took Harry’s words and rewrote them without any fact checking or research – which is incredibly sloppy.

Such things harm the trust we ought to have in this book, making other claims harder to believe. There was a widely publicized incident Harry attended a costume party in a Nazi uniform. It was apparently a costume party with a colonials and Native Americans theme. Harry states that at some point a Nazi uniform was suggested, and William and William’s then girlfriend Kate Middleton thought this would be hilarious and encouraged him to wear it. Harry excuses this as him being 20 years old and not thinking, which is believable. What is not believable is that Prince William, the third in line to the throne, would also think this was merely funny and encouraged it. William, being third in line, he must have been keenly aware, and constantly reminded, of remaining distant from any potential controversy – which is a strong royal tradition.

It is difficult to read that section and not think Harry is lying, but there are other sections that have been lied about. One of the weirder things that I have seen is this idea Harry claims the British army trained him to think of enemy combatants as like removing chess pieces off a board, which is simply not true. Harry says taking out enemy combatants felt like that because he was piloting an attack helicopter or directing bombs on a laptop. He was using a simile, not saying that is how he was trained to think. Another, it has been claimed Harry says he was William’s best man during his marriage to Kate Middleton. Again, this is not true, Harry does use the words ‘best man’ when referring to himself in that section, but it is clear from context that in using those words he was making a little joke. The most part he had the ceremony was carrying the wedding ring for a little while, he describes none of the other duties typical of a best man, and he even refers the actual best men as the best men while he stood to the side in his army uniform.

But there are also details and passages that leave you wondering ‘why are you telling us this?’ and the book is maybe too honest in place. Honesty in a book like this is refreshing, but some of the choices and stories included here are baffling. Like a moment when he talks with a bin in Courtney Cox’s house.

But is this book worth reading?

Maybe. This book is a rare look behind the curtains of royal life. You see a lot of the constrictions and regulations they have to live with. It is a different world – one so far removed from the work-a-day lives the rest of us have. At times you get the impression that they are themselves prisoners of circumstance – that their cage may be gilded and ornate, but it is still a cage. Living with never-ending press intrusions and their obsessions, and having to strictly adhere to tradition must be hard. I found myself wondering: would they would all be happier if they were not royalty. That’s a question you can feel behind the text, but Harry either does not address it or shies away from it. Yes they do good works – Harry is rightly proud of all the decent things he has done like organizing the Invictus Games, supporting charities for Africa and war veterans – none of that would have been possible without the privilege that has also cost him a lot too. Things here are complicated.

Also, this book is, despite its flaws, beautifully written. J. R. Moehringer is an excellent writer of sentences. You notice how good the writing and word choices are in the few pages of prologue. For example:

Another gust of wind. Funny, it reminded me of Grandpa. His wintry demeanour maybe.

I glanced now into the distance, towards the mini skyline of crypts and monuments

We wheeled, formed a line, set off along the gravel path over the little ivy-covered stone bridge.

These were taken more or less at random, and there is a lot of this throughout. It has a clear style, able to create complex images with very few words, and any creative writer would probably benefit from reading this. However, it must also be said that as the book goes on the good description does become less frequent or noticeable. It is also able to put you directly in the shoes of someone else. At times you feel like you are in Harry’s head, it is almost like you can feel the weight of his clothes on yourself.

So it is well written. It is informative. And it arguably shows, with some bizarre and random deviations, the points it was trying to make. Why does giving this book a recommendation feel so difficult?

Because this book is not structured. It is not like the book jumps around in time (it does in location, but that could not really be helped) but it really feels like a collection memories in chronological order. There is like there is no core to this book other than frustration and personal issues, something you cannot say about a memoir like Stephen King’s On Writing, to pick a totally random example. It seems that when drafting this book, no one looked at it as a unified whole and asked what the point of different parts were, or how they may be seen or interpreted. As such, this feels less like an intelligently structured essay and more like a rant filtered through good prose – and so there will be few reasons to reread it.

If this book did not have Prince Harry’s name on the cover, and was not about what it is about, I doubt this book would have been considered ready for publication. It feels like the draft of a better book that still needs to be edited. Maybe it should have spent longer being incubated but it is out now, and has since became the fasted selling non-fiction title in at least the United Kingdom’s history. Does it deserve to be? No.

This is not a bad book, at all, but it is not a good one either. Yes, it is well written, and even interesting, but it is shallow. It might be worth reading, but it is not worth keeping.

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