{"id":237748,"date":"2025-07-04T15:37:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T15:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/237748\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T15:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T15:37:09","slug":"rob-benvies-fourth-novel-the-damagers-explores-cults-in-1950s-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/237748\/","title":{"rendered":"Rob Benvie\u2019s fourth novel The Damagers explores cults in 1950s America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Author Rob BenvieRob Benvie\/Supplied<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 Hach\u00e9, who gravitates toward Zina because he recognizes something of himself in her: a thirst for power and a receptiveness to psychotropic drugs. <\/p>\n

\u201cSmall-minded people, they see all the empty spaces on a map as a problem,\u201d Peter rhapsodizes to his followers. \u201cThey 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\u2019t the end of anything. It\u2019s a way to get somewhere.\u201d <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Damagers, by Rob BenvieSupplied<\/p>\n

Gifted with a talent for transcription, Zina begins to record Peter\u2019s paranoid gospel, becoming a cog in his accelerationist revolution. Zina is primed to become Peter\u2019s successor, and together they shape the text that Peter believes will bring forth a transfiguration of all the social institutions known to man. <\/p>\n

Benvie believes that there is a sense of momentousness to his fourth novel, arising in part from its placement within his body of work. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis feels like a break from my previous books,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is the first novel where I really had a vision for it from the very beginning. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s because it was celestially delivered to me on high, or I know what I\u2019m doing better, but it feels like a fresh start.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Benvie continues. \u201cWe live in a way that\u2019s organized around our allegiances to certain systems of belief. Cults drive home our organizational tendencies in a cartoonish way.\u201d <\/p>\n

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 \u201cless 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

He started writing the novel during the first term of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, and as one American diplomatic disaster followed the other, Benvie began to consider how \u201cdeluded people imposing their vision on the world can result in cults, in political movements, in political parties.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cTrump was gold for a novelist because you see so transparently the extent of one man\u2019s vulgar nature creating history. It\u2019s Shakespearean to see this man\u2019s pettiness, how he imposes his will on the world. We\u2019re all bent to it. The appeal of a charismatic leader, of arrogant men, is that they\u2019re funny and buffoonish. I guess I have authority issues.\u201d <\/p>\n

35 hot new books to fit your summer mood<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cpostwar malaise and turn in culture toward individualism and self-discovery.\u201d In particular, Benvie became fascinated with the \u201cmission of the enlightened 20th-century person to \u2018self-actualize.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThis was manifested in advertising, television, movies and the literature of the time,\u201d Benvie explains, \u201cwhich then seeped into the counterculture with figures like Neal Cassady and Timothy Leary, shaping what would become a proto-hippie, romantic outlook \u2013 the New Age philosophy of the Beat poets.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Author Rob BenvieRob Benvie\/Supplied Last month, Halifax-born writer Rob Benvie released his fourth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,24789,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-237748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-noastack","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114795711786686761","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}