Leo Egger
Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Penguin Random House, 515 pages, $36
Adding my voice to the smorgasbord of content about Spare feels about as ridiculous as Prince Harry drunkenly playing strip pool with strangers in a Vegas casino and then being shocked and stunned (!) when pictures of him naked except for a panama hat were leaked to the press. But, hell, if I’ve learned anything from Harry, it’s to lay it all out there. So, let’s jump headfirst into the trauma, anguish, and a less than heartfelt literary allusions (??!!) of the red-haired rebel of Britain’s make-believe monarchy.
There is a mind-numbing excess of recent entries about modern British royalty in our cultural landscape: click-bait, articles, docu-serieses, The Crown, Queen Elizabeth bobbleheads, and a heavy stack of unauthorized “bombshell” biographies of Prince Harry himself. The marriage and subsequent antics of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are the biggest royal family story to hit the world since, you know, the Diana situation. (Prince Andrew's stint with Epstein is a whole lot less fun to gossip about than Harry.) Tabloids, Harry’s Public Enemy Number One, have generally depicted Meghan as a bully who’s hijacking royalty for stardom, and Harry as a hot-headed fool dragged along for the ride, burning bridges with his beloved family along the way. In pursuit of revenge—and financial security—Harry and Meghan have taken the battle to Buckingham Palace. In December, Meg and Harry released a six-hour mini-series on Netflix. (Imagine that Oprah interview, but three times longer.) Spare is the latest stop in their campaign to set the record straight with anyone who’ll pay to listen, although that hasn’t harmed sales. Over 3.2 million copies sold in the book’s first week of publication, making Spare the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time. Blimey!
In every book store and most 7/11s you can find Harry-as-sad-eyed bearded-man gazing out of Spare’s cover, as if he's been waiting too long for his sandwich at the deli counter. That means you already know more than you ever wanted to about Harry’s frostbitten “todger” (non-Brits: this means penis), acquired on a charitable trip with veterans to the North Pole, which caused him great discomfort at Willy’s (also penis, but in this case, Harry’s brother) wedding. You’ve read about the scene where Harry loses his virginity in a field behind a bar to a horse-loving older woman who did quick work with him and afterwards slapped him on the rump. You may have even heard a clip on the Internet from the audiobook, read by our boy himself, where he provides the delightfully Oedipal detail of applying Elizabeth Arden cream, which his mother applied to her lips, to his wanker. Or, as he puts it, with a proper and self-consciously dramatic pause, “…down there.”
But what’s missing from the clickbait and the leaks is the extent to which the book is rife with genuinely tragic and somewhat pathetic pathos. Against the decorative backdrop of royal life—castles, gardens and fox-hunts, described with dazzling precision by ghostwriter J. H. Moehringer—Harry reenacts royal performance after performance before our gaze.
Harry’s story begins with his mother and a summer night at Balmoral Castle in 1997, when Charles woke his children from sleep and delivered the tragic news. The whole United Kingdom put on its mourning clothes when Princess Diana died. Reflecting on the abuses of the tabloid press, which had stalked, tracked, and harassed her without consequence, the country even made a meager attempt to condemn media excess. Yet little thought was given to the children amid these national gestures of sympathy. In proper monarchical fashion, Harry and Willy, 12 and 14 respectively, put on their black ties and stepped into the royal mold without a moment to process grief. At the funeral procession, as thousands wept around them, Willy and Harry walked behind the coffin as it entered Westminster Abbey without a tear, as expected of them. Harry writes, “I remember feeling unspeakable sorrow and yet being unfailingly polite.”
Since Spare exists, our voyeuristic urge to stalk the royal family clearly did not end with Diana’s death. Days after the funeral, in a rare show of emotion, Harry reached for his father’s hand as he walked back from church. He cursed himself then, he tells us, because he knew he was just giving the media machine “exactly what they wanted. Emotion. Drama. Pain.” Harry is clear throughout Spare about blaming the “paps”––his derogatory nickname for the paparazzi––trailing his mother’s car for causing the crash which killed her.
Through childhood and tragedy, Harry was held behind a veil of make-believe. British royalty is like a Buddy’s Cake Boss™ cake: pretty as hell, but mostly styrofoam under the fondant. No matter how pointless the whole act seems during the era of Murdoch, the crown still expects its members to uphold and convey the dignity expected of the monarch. The family’s foundation is emotional repression. According to Harry, his father didn't even hug him when he delivered the devastating news. In the days following his mother’s death, Harry didn't dare cry. Only through therapy years later did he begin to process the grief.
One of the more affecting moments of the book Harry describes deciding to review the police file of his mother’s crash shortly after graduating highschool. He wanted to confirm his mother’s death after convincing himself for years it was an elaborate ruse she had constructed to free herself from the appetites of the media. He learns that the “paps” ran up to the crash site and took photographs of his dying mother instead of helping or comforting her. “I hadn't been aware, before this moment,” Harry writes, “that the last thing mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb.” Yet even seeing the file didn't quell his lingering doubts that his mother might still be alive. On a 2007 trip to Paris, he and Willy separately had their drivers take them through the tunnel where the accident took place at the same speed his mother’s car was driving. He accepted the reality of her death. Soon, anxiety set in that his life would mirror hers.
The conditions that led to Diana's death (and Harry’s suffering) are rooted in an insatiable craving for royal content, the trashier the better. The same urge has made Spare such an unparalleled commercial success. Why do we care so damn much about bickering over bridesmaid dresses and the drinking behavior of rather bland people? The historically unlikely preservation of the ornamentation and ritual of monarchy that is the United Kingdom captures our imagination. The ever-widening distance between this institution of monarchy and our modern world means that it has no purpose now but to be perceived: to be venerated or judged or pitied or ogled. We love it so dearly because we long for the imperfect in the ideal––the dissonance between fairytale and fact. We can pin our resentment, our urge for schadenfreude, on these royals because we feel that they, bestowed with every imaginable privilege, are fair game.
Hilary Mantel famously compared the royal family to pandas: interesting, expensive, and ill-adapted to any modern environment. The media rushes to fulfill our desire to watch these strange, caged creatures bumble around at the edges of our world. Perhaps, because they are absurdly rich and represent an imaginary Britain, it’s acceptable to stare and judge. But constantly being an object of scrutiny has been devastating for Harry, who comes across as a simple guy who just wants to be loved and left alone. A hefty (and rather boring) chunk of the book is devoted to Harry setting the record straight on basically every media slight done to him from minor misreporting on a rugby injury at Eton to criminal misconduct such as phone hacking and tracking. (Sending a prayer up for Moehringer for sitting through the innumerable Zoom sessions of Harry’s press-angry deluge.) And yet while Harry resents being an object of voyeurism, Spare seems to draw the watchers closer rather than push them. The only way through for Harry is to dig deeper.
Harry tried to escape the hollowness of his childhood life by seeking unambiguous glory in the war in Afghanistan, believing like Shakespeare’s Hal, that battle would be a path to self-definition––from goofball to goliath. On the back of the cover of the book is a photograph of Harry as a child in a miniature British military uniform, topped off with a beret bearing the royal cross; a name tag sewn into his costume reads H.RH. THE PRINCE. A grin on his face, he runs towards the camera with adult-like dignity. Harry’s costume turned to uniform when he joined the military after Eton, serving two terms in Afghanistan flying helicopters and directing bombers. Despite success, his responsibilities were limited and tours cut short because of his liability as target number one for the Taliban. His service was dominated by the ever-present threat of media exposure forcing him to return home. Prince preceded soldier. He was forced to give humiliating media interviews to avoid his location being exposed by the press before he returned to England. One stint was cut off early when an Australian newspaper broke the agreement.
For someone occupied with the bullshittery of ritual and image, Harry seems blind to it. Many of the arguments that tear through the royal family are about clothes and image. When Harry wanted to keep his beard for his wedding and was granted permission from the Queen, Willy became livid because he was required to shave his. There is tension over Meghan’s tiara, about whether Harry can wear his military uniform, and most seriously, whether Diana will receive an official royal burial. Harry famously dressed up as Hitler (!) for a costume party, which he claims he did out of mere stupidity. In the recollection, young Harry seems naive of the weight inherent in playing dress up and is shocked when he is shamed for his behavior. More than anyone else, he should know the power of a picture.
The back cover tells us from the beginning that Spare is about the pretend world grating against the real. The constant tension for the royals between fact and fiction seems to be the root of much of the family’s suffering. Indeed, it is also the root of our obsession with royalty: the discontinuity between an idea of a monarch bound to centuries of history and the reality of modern monarchs with not much to do except manage money and be criticized. It's fun to look into a perfect little dollhouse, but it's even better if that dollhouse is a financially irresponsible cabal plagued with familial backstabbing and sniveling courtiers.
Spare captures the horror of constantly being an object of voyeurism through many allusions to the stage, particularly Hamlet, a play about another prince with emotional problems and parental issues. Balmoral, where Harry learned of his mother’s death, is described as “a playground, a hunting ground, but also a stage,” and the lavish descriptions of red-coated footmen, gray star-shaped tiles, a dark-wooden carved mantle, and the distant bagpipes make the place feel like a set. In reference to the paps who treat royals like insects, Harry writes “what fun to pluck at the wings,” a reference to Gloucester’s speech in King Lear when he says of the gods: “like flies to wanton boys, they kill us for their sport.” When the media granted him the title Prince Thicko, he writes that he was cast without his permission in “a role that would last a lifetime.” The villains are rendered with a fairytale-like quality. The most despised paps, who follow Harry exclusively are referred to as Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. The Queen’s––aka Granny’s—courtiers who Harry claims were responsible for whipping up the resentment that forced Harry and Meg to leave are named after insects: the bee, the fly, and the wasp.
In Spare, Harry may very well be exposing the confines of the monarchy’s repressive cage. From his countless revelations about the institution of the crown and the press which revolves around it, this book is a damning account of the British monarchy. Of course, Harry never makes the bold leap and says that the monarchy must go. In the striking afterword, Harry writes that Windsor Castle, where all the milestones of life took place––graduations, marriages, christenings, crownings––is itself a tomb filled with his ancestors' bones. His life is bound to a legacy of the dead. No matter how much he tries to break free himself, he is consumed by his role born of the adorned coffins that surround him.
The greatest tragedy may be that, despite his supposed freedom, Harry is still controlled by the paranoia and resentment of his old life. It is all he has ever known. His only path to freedom is to shout his suffering into the media megaphone that he so hates. He desperately wants us to know how happy he is now with his beautiful wife and kids. He needs us to know that he was wronged. The more Harry bangs and bangs against the bars of the cage the more we hoot and applaud. What a great show.