Author Rob BenvieRob Benvie/Supplied
Last month, Halifax-born writer Rob Benvie released his fourth novel, a boundless leap into the world of cults, charismatic leadership and the spiritual emptiness at the heart of mid-century America. Benvie had memorable tenures in Canadian alternative rock outfits Thrush Hermit and the Dears, but he also became known for his literary novels Safety of War, Maintenance and Bleeding Light, released in the first two decades of the 2000s.
In The Damagers (Knopf Canada), Orson, Eliza, Zina and Presendia Morley live in idyllic solitude on Alstyne Farm, a parcel of land north of the Adirondack mountains. A Second World War veteran, Orson unleashes violence onto his family in a fit of madness, forcing 15-year-old Zina and 11-year-old Presendia to run away and fend for themselves in the wilderness. The girls are taken in by an intentional commune run by the enigmatic French-Canadian Peter Haché, who gravitates toward Zina because he recognizes something of himself in her: a thirst for power and a receptiveness to psychotropic drugs.
“Small-minded people, they see all the empty spaces on a map as a problem,” Peter rhapsodizes to his followers. “They see dams to build, they see boulder passes to dynamite. They see that emptiness as breeding grounds for danger. But the wilderness, it gets you acquainted with divine cruelty. And that opens possibilities. This land, these hills, it isn’t the end of anything. It’s a way to get somewhere.”
The Damagers, by Rob BenvieSupplied
Gifted with a talent for transcription, Zina begins to record Peter’s paranoid gospel, becoming a cog in his accelerationist revolution. Zina is primed to become Peter’s successor, and together they shape the text that Peter believes will bring forth a transfiguration of all the social institutions known to man.
Benvie believes that there is a sense of momentousness to his fourth novel, arising in part from its placement within his body of work.
“This feels like a break from my previous books,” he says. “This is the first novel where I really had a vision for it from the very beginning. I don’t know if that’s because it was celestially delivered to me on high, or I know what I’m doing better, but it feels like a fresh start.”
“I think that cults are interesting because they demonstrate how vulnerable people are to strange ideas, which generates conflict, but also it helps us to try to explain the forces that are shaping the world,” Benvie continues. “We live in a way that’s organized around our allegiances to certain systems of belief. Cults drive home our organizational tendencies in a cartoonish way.”
While Benvie says that he took some inspiration from the socialist utopias championed by figures such as Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes, he says he was “less interested in writing a faithful historical novel and more about how that tradition led to a continuum of thought that stretches all the way through the 20th century and to now.”
He started writing the novel during the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency, and as one American diplomatic disaster followed the other, Benvie began to consider how “deluded people imposing their vision on the world can result in cults, in political movements, in political parties.”
“Trump was gold for a novelist because you see so transparently the extent of one man’s vulgar nature creating history. It’s Shakespearean to see this man’s pettiness, how he imposes his will on the world. We’re all bent to it. The appeal of a charismatic leader, of arrogant men, is that they’re funny and buffoonish. I guess I have authority issues.”
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Set for the most part in 1954, The Damagers explores how the countercultural turn of the 1960s did not emerge in a vacuum, but was a product of the “postwar malaise and turn in culture toward individualism and self-discovery.” In particular, Benvie became fascinated with the “mission of the enlightened 20th-century person to ‘self-actualize.’”
“This was manifested in advertising, television, movies and the literature of the time,” Benvie explains, “which then seeped into the counterculture with figures like Neal Cassady and Timothy Leary, shaping what would become a proto-hippie, romantic outlook – the New Age philosophy of the Beat poets.”
“You could be an American outlaw by embracing a journey into the self, the wilderness. To live freely was to embrace American Romanticism influenced by Thoreau and Emerson. But there was a real strain of grandiosity and misogyny in that countercultural experience in the mid-century too, and I wanted to reveal that these guys who thought of themselves as living this dangerous, outlaw lifestyle were also petty and shallow.”
This strain of thinking has persisted to this day, Benvie argues, and has had long-lasting implications for much of the political unrest in the world, but perhaps especially so in the West, where solidarity in collective struggles can be difficult to achieve.
“We lament why the left has a problem taking hold in the culture right now, and why collective movements are not regarded in a positive way any more. A lot of it is because of selfhood and individualism is so ingrained in us that the destiny of every person is to be this ultimate version of yourself rather than to be one among many.”
