In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that
includes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Parker’s poignant novel
depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a
nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present
the callow protagonist’s life before, during and after this
ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to
the heaviness at the novel’s heart, as its characters strive to
rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human
happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parker’s alter-ego, is
drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the
twin ‘cankers’ of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling
loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic
relationship with life, which ‘Starts with the wound. Ends with
the kiss. For the lucky ones.’ This remarkable, posthumously
edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the
skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and
stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb
reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions
of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a
beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous
‘lost treasure’ of literature now presented to its reading
public.
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