Having written about Prince Harry’s “Spare” (Random House, 407 pages, $36) elsewhere – and written about him many times for a variety of publications — I wasn’t going to weigh in on this blog about the book. I thought it might be passé. But what I’ve learned is that with politically divisive figures — and make no mistake about it, the prince and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, are politically divisive figures — there is no such thing as passé. Witness this New York Times opinion piece, which plays right into the hands of everyone who defines liberals as “woke.”
I’m not going to reargue the article, except to say that while some members of the British press and posters have made scurrilous, racist remarks, the Sussexes must also be held accountable for their lack of professionalism in leaving the monarchy and the contradictory narrative they have put forth since. A similar contradictory quality dominates “Spare,” which purports to be an authentic account of Prince Harry’s life in his own words but is certainly not written in his own voice.
Many of the sensational details from the best-selling“Spare,” the first in a reportedly $40-million, three-book deal the Duke of Sussex inked with the publishing house, have long since been parsed. The loss of Prince Harry’s virginity at age 17 to an older woman behind a pub. The drug taking (both the recreational and the therapeutically supervised kinds). The killing of 25 members of the Taliban when he was in Afghanistan as a member of the British Army. The father (now King Charles III) who failed to hug him when he told him that “Mummy didn’t make it” after Princess Diana was involved in a fatal 1997 car crash in Paris. The stepmother (Queen Consort Camilla) willing to throw him under the bus with the tabloid press to further her own ambitions for the crown. The physical altercation with the adored big brother (William, Prince of Wales), who alternately protected him and pushed him away, requiring his own space.
The deathless drama over who did what to whom in bridesmaid-dress-gate. Did “Meg” (as Harry calls the wife he equates with his sainted mother) cry? Did “Kate” (Catherine, Princess of Wales), the sister-in-law described as the sister he never had but also a woman who is the mirror of her self-contained husband, cry? Reportedly, the Waleses’ daughter, Princess Charlotte – the little girl caught up in the dress mess – did cry. And you will, too, at the time spent on something so trivial when relationships, world crises and life itself hang in the balance. (A word of advice to men everywhere in the universe: When two women face off in the run-up to a wedding, head in the other direction.)
The biggest surprise in “Spare,” however, may not be its well-plumbed content but its tone – novelistic, bittersweet, wistful, elegiac – along with its word choice, sentence structure and use of metaphors and similes. When you read about hummingbirds that are like Odysseus in Homer’s “The Odyssey,” a Balmoral – the royal family’s Scottish Highlands home – right out of Arthurian legend and Albert Einstein’s view of the universe, which ties in with Princess Diana, then you know you are not hearing the voice of Prince Harry, who by his own admission in these pages is no scholar. (Pity bookish King Charles, dragging him to Shakespeare plays at Stratford-on-Avon. As Harry would say, no thank you. And yet Harry at one point equates himself with Hamlet. Well how can you equate yourself with perhaps the greatest character in the greatest play when you turn your nose up at it?)
That equation and the style of “Spare” – which is anything but – belong to J.R. (John Joseph) Moehringer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ghostwriter also of Andre Agassi’s harrowing, howlingly funny memoir, “Open.” Time was when ghostwriting, like self-publishing, was frowned upon. But in the digital age, in which everyone is potentially an author speaking his own “truth” – news to both actual writers and everyday, objective reality – bespoke memoirs and house tomes are all the rage, and ghostwriters have come out of the shadows.
Of course, Moehringer’s newfound celebrity itself becomes a metaphor for the delusions and illusions of “Spare.” The real ghost here is not the obvious writer of the book – or “Granny” (Queen Elizabeth II) or “Grandpa” (Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh), both of whom get an affectionate pass -- but Princess Diana, who hovers over it like a warrior angel, battling the evil tabloid press that hunted and killed her. (Never mind that she manipulated the press as well and made choices that conspired with the paparazzi in that fateful car crash in a Paris tunnel, including putting her life in the hands of charming but ineffectual movie producer Dodi Al Fayed and his drunken chauffeur, Henri Paul.)
If Harry has no clarity on his mother and on a wife who said she wanted to be “Diana 2.0,” it’s because he has no clarity on himself. As someone who disdains Hamlet as being too close for comfort, he should recognize that self-awareness is Hamlet’s defining quality, and his inability to act on that awareness his particular hell.
For Prince Harry, ignorance may indeed be bliss. He “writes” that he never minded being “the spare” to the heir to the throne, who didn’t get the bigger bedroom overlooking the courtyard at Balmoral, but, of course, he minded. Why else bring it up? Why else call the book “Spare”? Nobody likes being treated as a second-class person, but there are also hierarchies in every institution, business and family, in nature itself. It’s what you do with your place in the hierarchy of the world that matters. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were made president and vice president respectively of the Commonwealth, an important trade and diplomatic organization, positions for which they had no formal training and for which many Ph.D.s in international relations would’ve killed. Why couldn’t they carve out careers and identities in that opportunity, much as Harry’s “Aunt Anne,’ the Princess Royal, who emerges as a compassionate presence at the end of the book, has done in her quietly fine work with Save the Children?
When the story of the Sussexes is written 100 years from now, it will be cast as one of lost opportunity. In the meantime, there is “Spare,” which lacks the realization that we are all participants in our inability to achieve transcendence, a recognition that made Agassi’s “Open” so engaging.
You could say “Spare” misses the mist-shrouded Balmoral forests for its specimen trees. –