Here’s what I think about Spare, by Prince Harry.
I think it’s a very interesting book, a feat of psychosensory downloading by the master ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer. But it should have been called Spike. “The Spare”—as in, not the heir—is what members of the Royal Family have allegedly dubbed the brooding prince. “Spike,” however, is his nickname, or his most resonant one. It’s the one used by his more roistering and familiar chums. Spike is who Harry really is. Spike is his punk-rock Etonian ginger essence. Spike, as T. S. Eliot put it in “The Naming of Cats,” is his “ineffable effable / Effanineffable / Deep and inscrutable singular name.”
