Decades of repressed emotion tumbles out
What more is there to tell you about Prince Harry’s memoir? The dog bowl fisticuffs, the frostbitten penis, the stallion sex behind the Frog and Firkin – every detail of Spare has been mined. All that is left are the tiny details of royal life. Luckily, they can be entertaining, such as the moment Harry opened a Christmas present from Princess Margaret. She gave him a Biro.
This book is not the raging whingefest you might expect after watching Harry’s recent round of television interviews, or the Harry & Meghan
documentary on Netflix. His ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, has done a very good job of making his subject seem like the sane one in the story, which is not necessarily the impression gained from Harry’s sit-down with Tom Bradby this week.
Harry would be the first to admit that Moehringer has done the hard graft here, and perhaps deployed some artistic licence. I highly doubt that our hero did have deep thoughts about Gothic architecture, the nature of consciousness and the ghost of Wallis Simpson as he waited for a showdown with William, as happens in the opening chapter. His own contributions are limited to writing the acknowledgements, in which he sends his “adoringest” thanks to Archie, Lili, Meghan and her mother, and choosing the opening quote from Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner from Brainyquote.com. (“I thought, who the fook is Faulkner?”)
Harry does have a taste for drama though, so perhaps he is responsible for the tonal swings from Disney animation – Meghan singing to seals, and the seals singing back – to Hammer Horror: “The Tower of London was held together by the blood of animals … outsiders called us a cult but maybe we were a death cult?”
A therapist tells Harry, towards the end of the book, that she fears part of him is trapped in 1997 when his mother died. The reader has long since worked this out. That loss dominates Spare.
Your heart breaks for him on every page that mentions Diana. For years, a part of him clung to the idea that his mother wasn’t really dead but had fled the limelight. She was hiding out in a cabin in the Swiss Alps, and would soon send for her boys. One of 12-year-old Harry’s first thoughts on being told that she was dead was: “She’ll be back. She has to be. It’s my birthday in two weeks.”
After decades of suppressing his emotions, they are now tumbling out. Harry is now unfiltered, speaking his “truth”, but neither the ghostwriter nor the publisher saw fit to tell him that some things are better left unsaid.
Harry isn’t much of a reader, so is perhaps unaware that most celebrities don’t talk about losing their virginity in cringeworthy terms, but he throws the details away as casually as his description of trolley dashes around TK Maxx.
A level of self-absorption means that he does not appear to consider the feelings of anyone else here as he goes about settling scores. The King comes across as a man doing his best but his best is not good enough for Harry. Charles loves his “darling boy” – a term of endearment that crops up throughout the book – but struggles to connect with him emotionally. The Camilla of the book is a schemer, willing to sacrifice her stepchildren on “her personal PR altar”. Kate is an ice queen, freezing out Meghan for the crime of asking to borrow her lip gloss. She and William are portrayed as fantastically petty, although Harry also has an endless list of grievances about
being the “spare”, down to the respective size of their childhood bedrooms.
The book gives us insight into the minutiae of royal life – forget The Crown, this is the real insider’s take. The Queen making salad dressing, rows huffs about parking arrangements at Kensington Palace, the princes required to bow to a statue of Queen Victoria at Balmoral. At times it is an affectionate portrait, but then Harry bemoans his “Truman Show” existence and a way of life that has “rendered me otherwise unemployable”.
Then Meghan arrives and, boy, is Harry besotted. “She’s perfect, she’s perfect, she’s perfect,” he writes, even when she brings a yoga mat on their camping trip to Botswana. We’re into the realms of Netflix romance movies – apparently Meghan finds it endearing when Harry uses up all the gas and air for a joke while she’s in labour at the Portland.
But Meghan occupies only the last third of the book. The deepest love here is between a son and the mother he lost. Whatever you think of the way Harry has conducted himself, he deserves some compassion.