How Rob Benvie realized he wrote a cult novel
The Toronto author discussed The Damagers on Bookends with Mattea Roach
As Toronto author Rob Benvie wrote his new novel, The Damagers, he wasn’t really thinking about cults.
“It was only once the book was done that other people sort of described it as a cult novel,” he said on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
The Damagers, set in the 1950s in the Adirondack region of New York, follows two young sisters, Zina and Presendia, who flee their burning family farmhouse and find themselves in an isolated, hedonistic group of “settlers” secluded in the forest. In other words, a cult.
“I was just interested in that phenomenon of the coming together of communities against the society and how they tend to sort of form around a charismatic leader, not always, but sometimes. They're very rebellious, but also internally kind of repressive.”
Benvie, who born and raised in Halifax, joined Roach on Bookends to discuss his connection to Canada’s east coast, the charismatic power of cult leaders, and what it means to have a vision for the way we live together.
Much as I have, you've lived in Ontario for a while. But do you think having roots in Nova Scotia has shaped you as a writer or shaped the kinds of stories you like to tell?
That is an interesting question. My gut impulse is to say not really, but I would suggest that maybe there's deeper impulses there that I'm maybe denying.
I grew up in Halifax. I moved away in my 20s. And I'm not in my 20s anymore, so I've been in other places for a while since then.
But I think growing up in a smallish city kind of imbued me with a perspective on culture, on the larger culture, as a kind of peripheral view that lends itself well to being an observer of culture. Not that Halifax is in the middle of nowhere, but it's a little on the sidelines. And so maybe that allows you to kind of look in towards the greater forces shaping our country and our continent in a way that gives you a little insight or a little distance by which to observe things.
Your book features a community that forms in response to something that they're kind of resisting in society. What are the forces that this group is rallying against or trying to get out of in engaging in this experiment in communal living?
The novel takes place in the early ’50s, so at that time, it's the post-war era. American Society — and Canadian society as well — but American Society especially, was really shifting into this military industrial complex and the industrialization of society, the rapid growth of the financial industry and, from a certain viewpoint, a real lack of humanity. A real shift away from nature and the emergence of office culture.
Political society had become or was becoming tied to the country's industrial ends, industrial ambitions. So — and you saw this in the industrial revolution in Europe — that the response to that was romanticism in many ways. Romanticism and romantic poetry plays a big part in the novel too.
In my overworked imagining of this whole thing was imagining a kind of romanticism, a mid-century romanticism tied to a response to the post-war alienation.
In your novel, the leader of the communal living project is this guy named Peter who's actually come down to the States. He's originally from Quebec and he claims to have this connection to the divine and is very engaged in this transcendental, American version of romantic thought that you're describing. What is his actual vision for this society that he's trying to build?
It's complicated. It shifts and it changes and he's hard to pin down. That's intentional.
Ultimately, like many self-appointed leaders, he's an egomaniac. He's deluded. On one hand, he’s very convincing. On the other hand, he's kind of a buffoon. I think his vision is to kind of renovate or dismantle what he concedes as society, as his enemy, just dismantle it or destroy it.
On one hand, he’s very convincing. On the other hand, he's kind of a buffoon.- Rob Benvie
But if you press him a little bit, as the sort of hero of the novel, Zina, does when she presses him on it, he's a little bit at a loss as to what he thinks is going to come next as well.
Stories about utopias or communities that we hope will be utopias often begin with this kind of dreamlike, aspirational quality and then end up looking increasingly nightmarish. I'm wondering whether you think there's anything in these kinds of visions that does hold value, or whether these experiments are maybe always doomed to fail or to disappoint?
I think it's worth thinking about. When you're a kid, you look out at the world and it just seems so big. You look at skyscrapers or cities or just the scale of the world and it almost seems like these are natural phenomena that just came to be or were always there.
Especially as you get older, you just realize, “Oh, the world is just the product of people.” People made all these things. It seems sort of obvious to say that, but for me, that was a bit of a revelation when I was younger.
The world is just the product of people.- Rob Benvie
I look at everything in the world and just everything is just a product of people and everything is the product ultimately of human nature and you can apply that same thing to politics.
The political formation of our world can seem really daunting. And it almost seems inaccessible to normal people. But ultimately, politicians are humans and they're shaped by human nature and by their own insecurities and avarice and shortcomings.
The era right now, this Trump era, it's great fodder for novelists to look at. Here's a case where human nature is very explicitly, obviously, shaping the world we live in. This one man's insecurities are affecting the lives of millions of people around the world.
So to kind of answer your question if there's value in these kinds of societies? I don't have a good prescription for the best society. I'm glad I don't, but lots of people think they do.
I think there is value in these little communities. It's very appealing to me in some ways to join a commune or a little group out in the woods and we'll fend for ourselves and come what may. In some ways, that's a little more appealing than having to commute or to deal with all the many things we have to deal with in large cities.
But history shows a lot of time that those efforts are kind of doomed.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.
