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.
