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Raymond J. de Souza: Could drug-addled Harry's tome be the most boring book of the year?
Opinion by Father Raymond J. de Souza • Saturday
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Raymond J. de Souza: Could drug-addled Harry's tome be the most boring book of the year?
Opinion by Father Raymond J. de Souza • Saturday
Spare is a slog.
Prince Harry is very famous, but his life is not very interesting. His ideas less so. Yet, having written about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I felt professionally obligated to read, as the Sussexes would put it, “their truth.”
The reviews have not been kind. The BBC reviewer was dismissive, calling it the “
longest angry drunk text ever sent .” Other reviews were savage, ridiculing Harry for thinking that his dead mother sends him messages in the
form of animals .
Tedium sets in quickly. On almost every page there is someone being mean to Harry. No slight is too trivial to be remembered, resented, recorded and written down. At one point, even the Imperial State Crown, despite its evident elegance, torments Harry. It’s caged up in the Tower of London, not free as ordinary crowns are to wander the bright sunlit uplands, a metaphor for Harry’s lot in life.
Comedy can relieve the boredom. Jokes about his accounts of the frostbitten family jewels — not the ones in the Tower — almost write themselves:
Harry demanded privacy so that he could publicly describe his private parts …
“At all costs, I avoided sitting quietly with a book,” he writes about his teenage years, instead “memorizing long passages of
Ace Ventura .” Later, after meeting Meghan, who mentions a book that she is reading, he explains, at age 32: “Sorry. Not really big on books.”
That someone who doesn’t read would have the fastest-selling book in history is simply hilarious.
I invented a game to pass the time, trying to identify what words or phrasings could not possibly have come from Harry, but were invented out of whole cloth by the ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer. “Vertiginous”? Harry was a pilot, though, so perhaps. In any case, Harry recorded the audio book, which means he had to learn how to pronounce even the words he didn’t know.
As the tome dragged on, I suspected that Moehringer had written the entire book in a sort of code, undermining Harry even as it gave vent to his whingeing, with the ghost knowing that the principal was too daft to see through the draft. Moehringer littered the text with
obvious mistakes , easily fact-checked.
For example, as anyone who has visited King’s College, Cambridge — or looked it up on Wikipedia — ought to know, there is no direct line of descendants from King Henry VI. So when Moehringer has Harry saying that Eton was founded by his “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather,” he is revealing him as ignorant of basic royal history. Not even Henry VIII was a direct descendant of Henry VI, and Henry VIII’s line ran out with Elizabeth I.
Why repeatedly undermine Harry in his own “auto”-biography? It’s as if Moehringer wants to caution us against accepting anything Harry says as true.
Constant, unremitting drug use — cannabis, cocaine, psychedelics — marked Harry’s life from his teens onward. Settling in to his new home in Montecito in 2020, Harry lights up a joint. So when Moehringer includes Harry’s doubts about his own memory, is he warning us that at many points, Harry was too drunk or too high to be a reliable witness?
Related video: Prince Harry's memoir 'Spare' described as 'explosive' (The Associated Press)
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