Peter Tinniswood, ‘The Stirk of Stirk’ (1974)

 

What an oddity this book is. Tinniswood was, in his day, a quite successful comic novelist, writing mostly in Northern-English realist mode. He also adapted some of his books into fairly big-time TV comedy dramas. Perhaps his biggest hit was I Didn't Know You Cared which ran for four BBC series from 1975-79: an ensemble piece about a large and varied Yorkshire family, character-based comedy and local colour. My father still sometimes wheels out one of the show’s catch-phrases: deaf old Uncle Staveley’s “I heard that! Pardon?” Tinniswood had other TV successes, several long-running radio drama series, and also wrote a great many cricket-related stories: Tales From A Long Room (1981) was the first of nine such collections. He died in 2003.

The Stirk of Stirk is an entirely uncharacteristic Tinniswood. It’s a kind of fantasy novel set in a version of medieval England. The titular character is a Scottish warrior-nobleman, stern and unbending; he rides about with two companions, a dwarf with an enormous head who appears, from his dialogue, to be Welsh and a gigantic Black man who is a congeries of ghastly racist stereotypes: physically strong, hyper-sexualised, none-too-bright and prone to calling the Stirk of Stirk ‘bass’ and saying things like ‘man, man, what’s this?’ and ‘you idle cotton-pickin’ doggone sonofabitch’ and ‘oh, baby, yipperooooooo!’ These three are, in effect, bounty hunters, searching for Robin Hood, who has a price on his head—they find him almost at once, an elderly, miserable and utterly clapped-out geezer, living with ‘Maid Marion’, his young catamite. Unlike the monstrous racism of the Giant’s character, Tinniswood doesn’t indulge in as much homophobic tittering at this circumstance as I might have expected. He does, however, give us great scads of unreconstructed 1970s sexism: busty women of various kinds lubriciously described in various states of undress and ravishment. The style is dialogue heavy, a cascade of short, often one-sentence paragraphs, peppered with repetition and occasionally with arch narratorial interjections. It looks like this:

And sometimes, I’m sorry to say, like this:

My mother, who had I think several of Tinniswood’s regular novels, bought the paperback of this sometime in the late 1970s, which is when I first read it. I suppose I did so because at that stage—I was, twelve, maybe?—I was an obsessive reader of Tolkien and his imitators, and it looked like a Fantasy novel. It is a Fantasy novel too, although of a very different stripe to the standard commercial post-Tolkien heroic gubbins with which I was familiar. 

The thing is bits of this novel have, for whatever reason stayed with me. Here's one: the Stirk, his companions and Robin Hood and Marion (now their prisoners) are stranded in a snowstruck wood: the dwarf finds some hibernating hedgehogs, lights a fire, rolls the beasts into balls of mud and bakes them in the flames—when the mud has hardened he cracks each ball open, thereby breaking off the spines embedded in the mud, revealing the hedgehogs' well-cooked flesh inside—everybody cries with delight at how delicious this meal is. For whatever reason, it’s a little scene that has lodged itself in my head. Some of the sex stayed with me, too (I was at an impressionable age) but the main thing that has never left me is the novel's surreal ending.

So, the Stirk and his companions, after various peripatetic adventures involving sinister monks, strange beasts, violent Vikings, shapeshifting nuns etc, are captured by the evil Sir Ogden De Mobberley. He tortures them and then ties them to posts in his castle's arena where they will be killed by a gigantic, malevolent red bull. But the Giant saves the day, and this is how:

A hideous horrendous howl came from the throat of the giant.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

A scream. A shriek …

Everyone in the castle froze.

Motionless. Rigid. Mouths open. Locked.

And bound to the stake the giant writhed.

He thrashed. He squirmed. He screamed.

And from his great pink gash of a mouth there flew a crow.

And another.

And more. And more and more and more.

Soon the sky was filled with enormous monstrous black crows, which grew larger as every second passed.

They blacked out the sun.

Pitch blackness in the castle.

Total darkness over the surrounding lands.

Time stopped. [186]

The Stirk and his companions escape under cover of this darkness. But the sheer oddity of this scene, entirely unprepared-for in the earlier sections of the novel, really lodged in my imagination.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Fantasy as a genre recently, pursuant to writing something critically about it, and remembered this novel. Curious, especially since it is as unlike the mainstream of post-Tolkien Fantasy tradition as it is unlike the Pratchettian comic-Fantasy mode, I picked up a copy for peanuts on eBay (ridiculous how cheap old books are nowadays) and re-read it. In many ways this was a disappointing experience: the unleavened racism and sexism have aged catastrophically, and the book seems, on a reread, lesser than my inchoate memory of it. But the strange potency of that denouement, the crows flying out of the black man’s mouth, still has its power, I think.

I also tweeted some thoughts, having finished the book.