John P. Rooney
Bottling it Up
Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003. Pp. 252. $14.95

Reviewed by Brian Cliff

John P. Rooney's novel Bottling it Up is a comic narrative that lightly skirts more serious issues, both universal (fear of aging) and local (paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland). Although this is his first novel, Rooney also has extensive experience as a dramatist (primarily for radio), a medium potentially more forgiving of the flatness of characterization and plot that hinders Bottling it Up.

Often fairly engaging, the narrative at times becomes mired in the intricate hierarchies of internal politics in a public-housing architect's office, intricacies that Rooney (who has worked in such offices) clearly grasps but that the reader may find less interesting. The protagonist, Paul, is a forty-five-year-old architect who hits a midlife crisis when, amidst a divorce-in-progress, he learns that he has dangerously high blood pressure. Following this revelation, he arrives at the decision to reduce his stress by refusing to "bottle it up" or to be "Mr. Nice Guy." In particular, he begins to manage his building sites much more assertively and to demand that shoddy work be redone. This leads him into conflict with the paramilitary gangs who control the building trade. To intimidate him, they vandalize Paul's house and kidnap his cat, but he does not give in and nonetheless gets the cat back safely. While he also restores his marriage, the novel does little to depict the relationship as desirable. Even at his most tender, he characteristically thinks of his wife as "aggrieved."

The external drama is thus largely dependent on office politics and confrontations that never reach a convincing crisis; despite a moment when it briefly appears that the paramilitaries may kneecap Paul-he is, of course, quickly rescued by the police, who have been watching him in anticipation of such an attack-the book rarely sustains the sense that anything in Paul's life other than his cat may actually be at risk. As a result, his inevitable learning of lessons and his reconciliation with his wife are not fully plausible.

Unfortunately, the thinness of this narrative is little compensated for by psychological conflict. Despite the hectic events of his life and his persistent anxieties, Paul is largely a static character with little tendency to question himself once he has committed to a path: He begins with the shock of high blood pressure, stops "bottling it up," and rarely looks back until he changes his mind again and the novel comes to a halt. The plot's potential is similarly undermined by the dismayingly conventional elements of a midlife crisis, including predictable male friends, pathetic affairs, and a generic fear of "settling down." Although the genuinely stressful features of Paul's life create some sympathy for him, that sympathy is constrained by the sense of humor that leads him, for example, to name his black cat Sambo and by the sense of masculinity that sees his wife's plan to sterilize Sambo as "an attempt to castrate [Paul] at one remove." Like a Nick Hornby character with little charisma or self-awareness, Paul is too rarely likeable enough to be sympathetic and too rarely unlikable enough to be an antihero.

Readers of Irish fiction will recognize some of the terrain here, particularly as it is more deftly covered by other contemporary Belfast novelists such as Glenn Patterson or Robert McLiam Wilson, whose Eureka Street more effectively satirizes Belfast. Bottling it Up, however, resembles a slight hybrid of Eureka Street and generic British lad-lit. Neither remarkably bad nor remarkably good, Bottling it Up is at moments a mildly entertaining novel that offers certain rewards, particularly for those interested in Irish literature that is aimed at a popular audience.