The Spare - Book Review

My Guru says, "The ways of Karma are unfathomable".

Read this book to understand the gravity of this wisdom completely.

Terrifically written, heartbreakingly sad, numbingly melancholic and teeth-grindingly frustrating, "Spare" makes you relish your banality and being a commoner.

This is the story of Prince Harry, narrated by himself, as naked as he can be. Striking, revealing and deeply painful, I recommend it as a "Must read".

The tale of a young boy who is forever traumatised by the loss of his mother, terrible relations with his family and constant torture by the press.

What shines is his

• ability to keep growing up and fighting to survive.
• training in the army and serving for his country
• breaking free from being "Royal" and paying a very heavy price.

Snippets, anecdotes and quotes:

• "Then again, maybe our mother would be here. If she hadn’t married Pa...."
• "Being British, being Windsors, we began chatting casually about the weather."
• "Also, during her long, lonely reign, Queen Victoria was shot eight times, on eight separate occasions, by seven different subjects. Not one bullet hit the mark. Nothing could bring Victoria down."

Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.

• "For instance, Pa confessed around this time that he’d been “persecuted” as a boy. Granny and Grandpa, to toughen him up, had shipped him off to Gordonstoun, a boarding school, where he was horrendously bullied. I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there."

Distance was right, distance was safe, distance was survival. Distance was an essential bit of being royal, no less than standing on the balcony, waving to the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, your family all around you.

• (On Princess Magaret) "Growing up, I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness. She could kill a houseplant with one scowl."

"At the centre of the cross was a diamond the size of a cricket ball. Not just a diamond, actually; the Great Diamond of the World, a 105-carat monster called the Koh-i-Noor. Largest diamond ever by human eyes. “Acquired” by the British Empire at its zenith. Stolen, some thought. I’d heard it was mesmerizing, and I’d heard it was cursed. Men fought for it, died for it, and thus the curse was said to be masculine"

• "Every day, upon waking at five a.m., we were forced to down a huge bottle of water. The bottle was Army-issued, black plastic, a leftover from the Boer War. Any liquid inside tasted of first-generation plastic. Plus, it was warm. So, after the guzzling, moments before setting out on our morning run, some of us would fall to the ground and vomit the water straight back?up."

People assumed that royals generally had no career desires or anxieties. You’re royal, everything’s done for you, why worry? But in fact I worried quite a lot about making my own way, finding my purpose in this world. I didn’t want to be one of those cocktail-slurping, eyeroll-causing sloths everyone avoided at family gatherings. There had been plenty of those in my family, going back centuries.

• The Palace wouldn’t let me. In this, as in most things, the Palace stuck fast to the family motto: Never complain, never explain. Especially if the complainer was an eighteen-year-old boy.

As Conrade says: Can you make no use of your discontent?

• "The main reason was a phenomenon called “hover monkeys”. Just above the ground a helicopter falls prey to a fiendish confluence of factors: air flow, downdraught, gravity. First it wobbles, then it rocks, then it pitches and yaws?– as if invisible monkeys are hanging from both its skids, yanking. To land the helicopter you have to shake off those hover monkeys, and the only way to do that is by … ignoring them."
• "Everyone kept saying: Well, well, so this is where the King lived. Who? The King. Elvis Presley. Oh. The King. Right."

While being mock tortured... "A woman entered. She was wearing a shemagh over her face. She went on and on about something I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep?up. Then I realized. Mummy. She was talking about my mother. Your mother was pregnant when she died, eh? With your sibling? A Muslim baby!"

Get the book and read it.

All 200+ notes - https://www.goodreads.com/notes/63123822-spare/88044824-alok-kejriwal