The Vikings were mostly younger sons, footloose men whose older brothers were heir to the family farms in Scandinavia, and whose poverty left them with a tendency to pillage.

The first Vikings banded together in about the year 900 to man speedy boats built by prosperous local chieftains who gave them a cut of the spoils. They were excellent sailors who created profitable mayhem on the water but soon made a useful discovery. Christian cathedrals and monasteries throughout Europe were overflowing with precious artifacts, crosses studded with gemstones and thuribles made of gold. The Vikings launched lightning raids on the poorly-guarded cathedrals, not only making off with the thuribles (I like that word), but holding high-ranking churchmen hostage until great ransoms were paid. They also kidnapped women who took their fancy and sold random poor folks as slaves to Muslim potentates on the Barbary Coast. Sometimes they seized land as well, appropriating farms and founding cities. Dublin. Reykjavik. Kyiv.

In any case, during the Vikings’ 300-year heyday, a great deal of pillaging went on. Along, presumably, with a good deal of nose-thumbing at their dutiful older brothers stuck on the farm.

In the future United States, more than 700 years after the first Viking raids, the Crown gave huge grants of Indigenous land to the younger sons of British aristocrats in what would become the American South. This cohort of aristocratic sons with their cotton plantations would practice slavery too, creating a different culture than the one seeded by the self-lacerating Pilgrims who first settled the northern part of the country. Not that the Pilgrims didn’t pillage land from Indigenous nations as well. But there was a difference in the pattern and style of settlement that some scholars argue is behind the north-south divide in the U.S. today. 

During the early 20^th century, this time in colonial British East Africa, it was once again the younger sons of the British aristocracy who got their hands on large parcels of land; land that had been blithely stolen from people who had lived there for millennia. They formed the Happy Valley Set in what would become Kenya, a group famous for its partner swapping, heavy drinking and habit of dying young in entirely-preventable accidents. I’m going to pull a quote from Karen Blixen’s astonishingly-racist memoir Out of Africa, even though I’ve used it before. It concerns a member of the Happy Valley set named Reginald Berkeley Cole, a military man and the younger son of a British viscount, and it encapsulates the Happy Valley ethos.

Cole enjoyed drinking champagne in the woods of Blixen’s coffee farm at 11 o’clock in the morning, his servant standing behind him to refill his glass. “Once, as he was taking leave of me, and thanking me for his time on the farm, he added that there had been one shadow in the picture, for we had been given coarse and vulgar glasses for our time under the trees. ‘I know, Berkeley,’ I said, ‘but I have so few of my good glasses left, and the boys will break them when they have to carry them such a long way.’ He looked at me gravely, my hand in his. ‘But my dear,’ he said, ‘it has been so sad.’ So afterwards he had my best glasses brought out into the wood.”

Which brings me to Spare, the bestselling memoir of Prince Harry, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer. The title famously refers to the fact that Prince Harry is the younger son of the newly-crowned King Charles III, spare to the heir, his older brother William.

Thumbnail review: Everything you need to know about the book is contained in the title and the name the author has chosen to use. Spare is shorthand for the self-pity and sense of grievance that drive the book. Poor me. Second string. And by calling himself Prince Harry when he could have chosen, say, Henry Wales or Henry Windsor, Harry shows how much he likes being a prince. This, even after stepping back from royal duties to live in California and sign a reported $100 million development deal with Netflix.  Poor me, who has an awful lot but wants it all.

It’s marketing, of course. A tome by Henry Windsor, Thoughts on the Future of the British Monarchy, wouldn’t sell. In any case, Harry doesn’t appear to have any deep thoughts about the future of the monarchy, nor in fact about anything else. He has grievances, scores to settle, dirt to dish, patriotic stories to retail about his life in the military and despite his disclaimers, a grand old British fondness for drinking, wild parties and his todger; a todger we learn got frost-nipped during an aborted trek to the North Pole. He also hates the paparazzi and says so on almost every page.

It’s clearly an obsession. Harry has authored four current lawsuits against the British media, including three over alleged phone hacking against Rupert Murdoch’s Mail newspapers and a libel suit against the Mail on Sunday. He recently became the first member of the British Royal Family in 140 years to take the stand in a legal case, testifying for eight emotional hours, and saying afterward in interviews that his aim is to reform the British tabloid newspapers.

Of course, the poor man lost his mother, Princess Diana, when her car was chased by belligerent paparazzi, and her drunken chauffeur drove the Mercedes into a tunnel wall. Yet in his book, Harry doesn’t have anything all that interesting to say about the tabloid press, either. He details how much money a pap could make for a photo of him with a particular girlfriend in a particular year. He calls a notably persistent pair Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber. But if you’re looking for a thoughtful exploration of what fame does to both a celebrity and his stalker—the pas-de-deux, the longing, the hatred and self-hatred—you won’t find it here. 

Analysis? Not so much. Perspective? Not really. What Harry’s book does is provide raw data for a look at the current state of the British royal family and, sideways, of the monarchy itself. I suspect that this is its main value beyond the gossip: as a source for scholars’ future work rather than as a fully-achieved end product. Maybe I’m biased. I read the book as research for a novel I’m writing in which one of the characters is a younger son. Not to be reductive, but psychologists speak of birth order as important to the formation of character. So is sibling rivalry, and Harry’s book provides a useful gloss on that, bashing away at his conflicts with his brother, who is reportedly not pleased with the book, to put it Britishly.

Spare opens after the death of Princess Diana. Or her disappearance, 12-year-old Harry decides. His mother hasn’t really died. She’s gone into hiding to escape her relentless hounding by the paparazzi, and she’ll reappear someday to soothe his hurt—a fallacy he holds onto, he says, for the better part of a decade.

Small revelations like this have already been written up extensively in the press. The way his father, Prince Charles, takes some care in telling Harry about Diana’s death, but doesn’t give him a much-needed hug. The way Harry decides at his first school, Ludgrove, that he’ll never be a scholar and throws himself into sports instead. How he later goes to Eton, joining William (whom he calls Willy throughout), and is crushed when his older brother consistently ignores him. His discussion with his father (Pa) about his unsuitability for university—he doesn’t read many books—and his wish for a career in the military. “Yes, darling boy. The Army sounds like just the thing.” His loss of virginity in a field behind a pub, his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, his 25 kills, his late diagnosis of ADHD, his fondness for flying off to Africa to camp in the bush when he’s sad. (It never seems to occur to him that most people can’t afford to do this, and that he’s lucky he frequently can.)

Throughout, we hear about his many fights with his brother, including a shoving match in which the enraged heir sends the spare flying into a pair of dog bowls, which shatter beneath his back—a revelation that’s disputed, for the record, by people who claim to know that the dog bowls in question weren’t ceramic.

Yet what pulled me up short was a scene at Balmoral, the favorite home of Queen Elizabeth II. (Granny.) It’s a rite of initiation. Harry is about 15 years old and has just shot a stag, guided by a Scottish retainer named Sandy, whom he says is a thousand years old and looks as if he’d stalked mastodons. 

“When we reached the stag I was relieved. Its eyes were already cloudy. The worry was that you’d merely cause a flesh wound and send the poor animal dashing into the woods to suffer alone for hours. As its eyes turned more and more opaque, Sandy knelt before it, took out his gleaming knife, bled it from the neck and slit open the belly. He motioned for me to kneel. I knelt. 

“I thought we were going to pray.

“Sandy snapped at me: Closer!

“I knelt closer, close enough to smell Sandy’s armpits. He placed a hand gently behind my neck, and now I thought he was going to hug me, congratulate me. Atta boy. Instead he pushed my head inside the carcass.

“I tried to pull away, but Sandy pushed me deeper. I was shocked by his insane strength. And by the infernal smell. My breakfast jumped up from my stomach. Oh please oh please do not let me vomit inside a stag carcass. I couldn’t smell anything, because I couldn’t breathe. My nose and mouth were full of blood, guts, and a deep, upsetting warmth.

“Well, I thought. So this is death. The ultimate blooding.

“Not what I’d imagined.

“I went limp. Bye, all.

“Sandy pulled me out.

“I filled my lungs with fresh morning air. I started to wipe my face, which was dripping, but Sandy grabbed my hand. Nae, lad, nae.

“What?

“Let it dry, lad. Let it dry.

“We radioed back to the soldiers in the valley. Horses were sent. While waiting, we got down to work, gave the stag a full gralloching, the Old Scottish word for disemboweling. We removed the stomach, scattered the junky bits on the hillside for hawks and buzzards, carved out the liver and heart, snipped the penis, careful not to pop the cord, which would douse you with urine, a stench that ten Highland baths wouldn’t cleanse. 

“The horses arrived. We slung our gralloched stag across a white drum stallion, sent it off to the larder, then walked shoulder to shoulder back to the castle.”

Walked shoulder to shoulder back to the castle. This happened at the turn of the 21^st century, not during the early British settlement of North America or as the Vikings dropped anchor off France. Prince Harry is tied so much more firmly to the past than most of us, even if he spent his school days unable to remember the names and order of the British kings who were his ancestors. It makes the rest of the book feel antique as well: the epic carousing, the army deployments, the 25 kills on his military record, even if he made them electronically. You can even look at the tabloid press as part of a fine old British tradition. The paparazzi are Harry’s Fool, and as they heckle and jeer, they can tell some unflattering truths about his behaviour that the prince, like Shakespeare’s Lear, would rather not face.  

Yet there’s a break it the continuity. Harry falls in love with a woman of mixed race, the American actress Meghan Markle. The younger sons who became Vikings or Southern gentlemen were slavers, and members of the Happy Valley crowd were flagrantly racist. But as Harry and Meghan meet and marry, they’re the ones who have face racism from the British courtiers, the press, the public and arguably from his family (although that’s disputed, too). Finally, they decamp to California, titles in tow and their $100 million deal with Netflix soon in hand. The details of their courtship and marriage are given at somewhat tedious length, even though the bigger picture is missing: the significance of their mixed marriage to the future of the monarchy. Presuming there is any.

While reading Spare, I also picked up an article by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker to mark the coronation of Harry’s Pa as King Charles III. Mead mines several biographies of Charles to write a portrait of the cranky new monarch, noting that he has his nose in a book all the time while delicately implying that he doesn’t fully understand what he reads. How fascinating. Someone who reads obsessively yet isn’t all that intelligent—although as Mead notes, “compared with his parents and his siblings he’s a raving brainbox.” 

To his credit, Charles was an early environmentalist. Yet the details of his environmental efforts show the disconnection from real life that plagues both him and Harry. Mead says that in an attempt to tackle the climate crisis, he recently converted the engine of his vintage Aston Martin so that it now runs on surplus wine and leftover cheese whey. According to his biographer Tom Bower, he also asks a team of four gardeners at his country estate in Gloucester “to lie face down on a trailer as it is dragged by a slow-moving Land Rover, so that they can pull up weeds.” 

Why, with all the money in the world, can’t the man model solutions that might actually prove useful? And why is Harry fighting lawsuits about phone hacking when the tabloid press has already stopped the practice?

Edward Coram James, chief executive of PR agency Go Up, spoke about the spare to Newsweek. “‘If Harry really wants the U.K. press to stop being unkind to Meghan, then there is only one thing that he should do about it. Step out of the limelight for a bit. If Harry and Meghan truly want the press to stop criticizing them, then they need to lay low. The press cycle will move on.

“‘There is no question that the U.K. tabloid press can be deeply inappropriate, and some of his concerns are valid,’ he said. ‘However, the only thing keeping the press interested at the moment is the Sussexes’ constant and intentional headline-grabbing.'”

Maybe someday a scholar will indeed mine Spare—and Harry’s and Meghan’s Netflix special and Oprah interview—to reach useful conclusions about Harry Wales and his role in the monarchy of Great-ish Britain. What will Harry ultimately accomplish by pillaging his way through the already-shaky reputation of the royal family? Aside, of course, from earning a great deal of money, something that makes me think about the many meanings of the words “spoils” and “spoil” and “spoiled.”

Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, obviously did what he could. The book is episodic and far too long but I’ll close by saying it’s clearly written, even though I can’t help stumbling over one tendency.

The heartfelt paragraphs can be very short at climatic moments.

Like a burst.

Of gunfire.

Taking down a stag.

Spare by Prince Harry is available just about everywhere, including here.

Lesley Krueger is the author of a memoir, despite not being a princess. It’s called Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales.