I can imagine that when published in 1969 A BOUQUET OF BARBED WIRE might have caused something of a stir. After all it features a father whose love for his young adult daughter can best be described as unhealthy (at worst, sickeningly creepy), two extra marital affairs, domestic violence perpetrated against a pregnant woman and a woman having sex with her son-in-law. And 45 years later those plot elements should still be enough to make a book interesting if not as shocking as it might have been at the time of its release. But I found it as dull as dishwater.

A dramatic plot is all well and good but, for me, a decent read also needs engaging characters and there really aren’t any here. Peter Manson is the creepily possessive father of Prue, a university student who has, when the book opens, recently married one of her lecturers, Gavin, to whom she is pregnant. Daddy is, to put it mildly, not amused. Rounding out the main cast are Sarah, the poor young woman who unwittingly substitutes for the daughter he can’t have as the object of Peter’s lust and Peter’s wife Cassie, who contributes nothing of interest until near the very end of the novel when she tells her husband of her own wretched affair some years earlier and takes out the dubious honour of most disturbing sexual encounter of the novel when she has sex with the son-in-law she knows has beaten up her daughter. But not one of them, not even Prue whose morality is the soundest of the lot and who really has done nothing to deserve the horror that befalls her, are remotely sympathetic. They’re all self-absorbed and whiney which I admit is a realistic representation of the human race but does anyone want to read about such bores?

In the end the book seemed to me to be trying way too hard to shock and not hard enough to tell a believable, engaging story. It drags along turgidly and predictably and I was well and truly pleased to reach the end.