Colquhoun’s shorter prose pieces are straightforward in both style and content. They are each based on a single idea, often derived from a dream or an observed event and rely for their effect upon the strength of that idea. They depend upon the author’s ability to invert reality, make unexpected connections and adopt unconventional perspectives. Nature Note (1), for example, compares the flight patterns of moths and aircraft. Her subject matter generally concerns some aspect of her favourite preoccupations: the occult, death and gender. Some examples will make this clear.
An unpublished short story The Mars Reactor, concerns scientists who have created a race of monsters, ‘50ft tall homunculi’ which have the potential to turn against their makers. Colquhoun makes the sobering observation that, as they have souls, human kind could not escape them even after death.
Warden of the House of Quiet is set within a religious order where ‘each Brother and Sister took a man’s name and a woman’s, to symbolise the perfection of the hermaphrodite.’
Another story, The Return, focuses opon the relationship between the world of spirit and the world of matter. Of mirrors, one of those nodal places used by skryers to penetrate the former from the latter, Colquhoun writes that the heroine ‘always sensed an uncanny quality in such reflecting surfaces – might not something more be returned than was put in?’
Images of Joy is a transgressive text, containing a description of a peasant defecating, and the beauty of the product. (2)
Notes
1. Colquhoun, I. The Moths. London Bulletin No. 10, February 1939.
2. The Mars Reactor manuscript is at TGA929/2/1/37. Typescripts for Warden of the House of Quiet, The Return and Images of Joy are at TGA 929/2/1/38. All four texts are unpublished.
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