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A Bouquet of Barbed Wire Review
Most of Andrea Newman's works are now out of print, but during the late sixties and seventies she had the reputation of being the enfant terrible of British literary fiction. "A Bouquet of Barbed Wire" became her most controversial work after it was serialised on television in 1976. Many books, films and television programmes which were considered scandalously explicit during that period have since become part of the cultural mainstream, but this one, with its themes of incest and domestic violence, still seems shocking shock even today.
The novel is reminiscent of the works of Newman's exact contemporary Margaret Drabble and her older contemporary Iris Murdoch in that it deals with the love lives of members of the prosperous middle classes of London and the Home Counties, although Newman seems to deal with her themes with a greater sexual frankness. At the centre of the book is a complex web of relationships between five main characters; Peter Manson, a well-to-do middle-aged publisher, his wife Cassie, their nineteen year old daughter Prue, Prue's American husband Gavin, and Sarah, Manson's secretary with whom he is having an affair.
The most controversial element in the plot is that Manson's feelings for Prue go far beyond a normal father-daughter relationship, verging on incestuous desire. All the other plot developments flow from this. Manson does not dare to break the legal and social taboo against incest, and his affair with Sarah, a girl around Prue's age, can be seen as a sublimation of his feelings for his daughter. He resents Prue's marriage partly out of suspicion that Gavin will not prove a good husband, but also partly out of ill-concealed sexual jealousy. Prue discovers her father's affair, which she sees as a betrayal and informs her mother, leading to a separation between Manson and Cassie. In revenge, Cassie begins an affair with Gavin.
Although this is a work which deals with strong emotions and sexual passions, Newman's style is cold and emotionally detached, as though she were trying to distance herself from her characters, who resemble pieces pushed around a chessboard more than they do living human beings. They never come to life and the motives for their actions often remain obscure. Particularly baffling are the relationships between Gavin and Cassie and Gavin and Prue. Manson's suspicions of Gavin's suitability as a husband prove well-founded, as he turns out to be violent and abusive, on one occasion beating his wife so badly that she has to be taken to hospital. His appalling treatment of her daughter, however, does not prevent Cassie from taking him to bed. Even more offensive is Newman's implication that Prue herself, motivated by masochistic tendencies, deliberately provokes Gavin's behaviour.
Although this is not an overt piece of erotica, Newman's approach to sexual matters resembles that of the pornographer. Whereas the growing climate of liberalism enabled other writers of the period to make use of sexual frankness as a means for exploring the human psyche with greater honesty, for her it seems to have become an end in itself, or at most a means to win herself a reputation for controversy and thereby to achieve a succes de scandale. "A Bouquet of Barbed Wire" resembles a piece of half-hearted pornography, an erotic novel with the most erotic passages bowdlerised. I found it cold, pretentious and lacking in any insight into human relationships, more concerned to shock than to illuminate. Having read this book (the first I have reviewed which I have awarded only one star) it did not surprise me that Newman's reputation has declined so much since the seventies.
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire Overview
"Newman is superb at crawling under the skin of our insecurities about relationships."-The Times
"Andrea Newman has an entertaining ability to shock."-Guardian
Peter Manson loves his daughter fiercely. So fiercely that he almost loses her in his fury when he discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend, Gavin. Wounded and confused, he begins an affair with his secretary and neglects his wife. Within this short summer, his whole family will be turned inside out, with secrets from the distant past returning to haunt them all.
Andrea Newman is a novelist and screenwriter. She lives in London.
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