Prince Harry’s Spare ends with a whimper not a bang

The epigraph for Spare, Prince Harry’s frenziedly awaited memoir, is from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. It states simply ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ As a gesture of authorial intent, it’s a bold one. It suggests from the outset that this is not going to be some backwards-gazing book, but instead that it is going to be fully engaged with the present. Given the fact that Spare’s publication has dominated headlines for days, it’s not an inaccurate statement.

Yet – how best to put it? – Harry has never struck most of us as the kind of man who habitually quotes Faulkner. His Pulitzer Prize-winning ghostwriter JD Moehringer (credited in the acknowledgements as ‘my collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner’), however, seems like someone who might. So it’s something of a surprise when Harry announces, early in the book, that he discovered the quote on BrainyQuote.com, before he asks ‘Who the fook is Faulkner?’ 

We all know who the fook Harry is, though. It’s impossible to come to Spare without the weight of expectation overwhelming it. It’s the first autobiography to be written by a male member of the Royal Family since the Duke of Windsor’s A King’s Story in 1951.