A review of a royal kiss-(and-kill-and-mount-)and-tell
Distance, Harry explains at one point in this book, “between Yourself and Them”—which is to say between Us and Him—is “an essential bit of being royal”. But there is no distance here. None. You even get the freckles on his body as he strips naked and is checked for ticks at Balmoral.
When leaks from “Spare” started appearing on January 5th, a mood of delighted disbelief settled on British newsdesks. Royal correspondents used to subsisting on crumbs—an innuendo buried in six hours of anodyne Netflix nonsense here, a plucky first day of school for Prince George there—suddenly found themselves glutted by revelations on everything from how many Taliban he killed in Afghanistan to his “nether regions”.
In one way, this book is fun. Penguin, the publisher, had threatened a “literary memoir”; happily “Spare” is nothing nearly so dull. Its literary style is manly thriller. Its sentences are simple;It is, in short, a romp. And obviously the access is excellent. Alan Bennett once wrote a novella about the queen in which he imagined the humdrum side of royal life, and this book does Bennettian humdrum better than Bennett.
It is all very engaging. But it also feels somehow iffy. “Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful…since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” This book manages to feel both like a series of defeats and somewhat untrustworthy at the same time. Things are rarely just Harry’s fault.
For all the romps, and the rumps, this book feels less like a lark than a terrible miscalculation. Harry, as he points out himself, is the creature in the gilded cage. Presumably he hoped that by writing a memoir, he’d set himself free. The cage isn’t fashioned by the royals, however, but by the eyes of the audience. By revealing so much, all he has done is draw the bars in closer. The Firm would have stopped him from producing a book like this. And that would have been a service.
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