Book review: The red meat in Harry's Spare comes in fine detail of family interactions

(Left) Prince Harry or just plain Captain Wales as he is known in the British Army, makes his early morning pre-flight checks in the cockpit on the flight-line, at Camp Bastion southern Afghanistan, where he is serving as an Apache Helicopter Pilot/Gunner with 662 Sqd Army Air Corps, from September 2012 for four months until January 2013.

• Spare
• Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex
• Bantam, €30.99

Prince Harry's Spare is an unusual prospect for the reviewer, and not just because striking the right note when referring to the author is a challenge.

How should he be described in the review? Prince Harry? Craven. Windsor? Bewildering. The Duke of Sussex? Shakesperean.

Harry? A bit too matey, which may be the intent, but the only realistic option. Harry it is.

The traditional approach when reviewing a book with such striking news value is to discuss some of the revelations made, to evaluate them for their shock value, and to guess at the effect those revelations are likely to have on those directly implicated.

Not here, though. The bombshells dropped in this book by former helicopter pilot Harry, no pun intended, have been noted, analysed and evaluated across every media platform known to humanity for the last week.

The loss of his virginity; his antipathy towards the media (of which more anon); his interest in TK Maxx (of which more anon), and his tangle of family vendettas (of which, etc etc).

No-one in possession of a smartphone can claim ignorance of the book’s main highlights, even such unexpected treasures as Harry’s frostbitten penis (of which definitely no more anon, or ever).

For many readers, however, the red meat here comes in the fine detail of the family interactions, and in particular the background to Harry’s estrangement from the rest of the royal family. To fully appreciate that estrangement, however, means engaging with the entirety of the family’s comic opera, seething away for years, and that may winnow out the amateurs in favour of the true Windsorati.

And you are either a Windsor maven or you are not. You either have terms like Squidgygate at your fingertips and individuals like Tiggy Legge-Bourke in your mental rolodex, or you are nothing. Or you will understand nothing, at least.

On the other hand, if you are a wholehearted subscriber to the royal soap then delights uncounted await you. Harry’s book is a steroidal content generator — it is already acting as the originating particle for a thousand think pieces, countless columns, innumerable viewpoints, as observers sift through the misunderstandings and misapprehensions, the petty jealousies and grudges which flare up in the Windsor household, and which Harry recounts in great detail.

One of the more significant themes in the book — a theme which will be developed by many platforms available to readers, and at some length — is Harry’s relationship with the media. He doesn’t profess to be an omnivorous reader but clearly consumes a vast amount of press coverage of his family and himself.

The bombshells dropped in this book by former helicopter pilot, no pun intended, have been noted, analysed and evaluated across every media platform known to humanity for the last week.

It’s hardly a surprise that the paparazzi come in for scathing criticism in the book, given the way Harry’s mother died, pursued by photographers into a Paris tunnel. One of the most powerful passages comes when he asks to see top secret photographs of that 1997 crash and realises that the bright lights seen in the most graphic picture are the flashes of the photographers’ cameras, snapping pictures of his dying mother in the wreckage of her car rather than helping her in any way.

On a far lighter note, one of the more hilarious passages provides a scoop any paper would kill for.

Harry’s father asks if his then-fiancee Meghan intends to keep working when they’re married. Harry answers:

... I wouldn’t think so. I expect she’ll want to be with me, doing the job, you know, which would rule out Suits … since they film in … Toronto.

Hmm, I see. Well, darling boy, you know there’s not enough money to go around.

I stared. What was he banging on about?

He explained. Or tried to. I can’t pay for anyone else. I’m already having to pay for your brother and Catherine.

That would be Prince Charles, now the King. Saying he ‘can’t pay for anyone else’.

Elsewhere in the book there isn’t quite as much gentle lampooning of Harry’s Pooterish Pa as there is sharp indictment of Charles and Camilla’s fondness for leaking stories to the press, and not just about Harry. He recounts his brother William’s anger because “Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him, and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it any more. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.”

(A moment’s pause here to appreciate the titles on offer. Charles is Pa, William — Willy. Margot is Princess Margaret. Harry’s ex-girlfriend Chelsea Davy? Chels. The man himself is sometimes Haz — to his mates.)

This mutual dependence of the royal family and the media is an interesting strand though Harry’s descriptions of the press are pretty unambiguous (“They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died.”), all of which casts his father and stepmother’s co-operation with the media in even deeper shadows.

The book is fluent, an easy read, and that is no back-handed compliment. There was some (very) performative anger on social media about Harry using a ghost writer in the first place, as though no fading soap star or failed footballer who ever inked a publishing contract hadn’t lassoed a drudge to massage their thoughts into coherence.

Harry’s ghost, JR Moehringer, may be known to readers as the writer of The Tender Bar, a memoir of being raised in his uncle’s pub on Long Island, though his work with Andre Agassi on the tennis player’s biography is presumably what earned him this commission. (The sports biography field can be a pretty bleak landscape, but Agassi’s is certainly one of its towering peaks: many sportspeople cite it as a favourite read — with good reason.)

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle are no strangers to media exposure, they featured in the Netflix documentary series — ‘Harry and Meghan’ — which was released on the streaming service late last year.

The Tender Bar was recently made into an Apple TV miniseries (starring Ben Affleck, himself no stranger to the paparazzi over the years), and Moehringer’s eye for composition is sometimes powerfully cinematic.

In the scene mentioned earlier, when Harry is shown photographs of his mother’s fatal car crash, the quick descriptive sketch of the circumstances — being hustled up a back staircase to a poky office, being handed the DO NOT BEND envelope with the pictures, going through them sequentially, one by one, to the last and most graphic — reads like a brisk draft for a screen treatment.

Again, that is no criticism. Moehringer has done a very good job with the material to hand, and the occasional dud note is easily absorbed (farming in remote Australia, Harry gets briefly philosophical: ‘Cows need their space. I felt them.’) .

Less easy to explain is Harry’s odd fascination with TK Maxx and his passion for their annual sale: ‘If you timed it just right, got there on the first day of the sale, you could snag the same clothes that others were paying top prices for down the high street! With two hundred quid you could look like a fashion plate.’

TK Maxx have since spoiled the effect a little by claiming they never have annual sales, which shows a depressing lack of appreciation for the poetry of Harry’s enthusiasm. This is one of the funniest passages in the book, with that incredulous question mark and the tone-perfect ‘quid’ to round it off.

Spare is well on the way to becoming a publishing sensation, and its ubiquity means prospective readers will know beforehand whether they’ll enjoy it.

This one did. Harry and his wife have been targeted shamefully by some UK commentators, with Meghan often cast as the arch-manipulator. This book shows Harry’s father and stepmother have little to learn in that department, which is just one of its more furtive joys.