Canadian Leslie Hall Pinder's third novel is set in the Pacific Northwest in roughly contemporaneous Vancouver. The inciting action takes place in 1957 on Anthony Island, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, when anthropologist Austin Hart and his expedition cut down the largest existing stand of totem poles and transport them to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. Some consider him a hero for saving the Haida cedar poles that would ultimately have disintegrated in the rainforest. But others wonder if perhaps his were the actions of a thief. The morally charged question reverberates throughout Pinder's fascinating novel.
In the novel's present time, the point-of-view character, Alix Purcell, an award-winning poet and writer, is commissioned to write the libretto for an opera about Hart's life, which ended in suicide a few years after his removal of the Haida totem poles. During her research she learns much about Haida culture, about Hart's own ambivalence regarding his actions, about herself and her complicated relationship to the brilliant, controversial anthropologist whose death she's trying to explain.
Pinder, who was for many years a lawyer working with native people on their land claims, said in a recent interview she's returned to her "first love" of writing, and that she's "redeploying" herself, infusing her knowledge of and experiences with native people into this new novel. A compulsively readable work, "Bring Me One of Everything" delves into issues of belonging, identity and greed, as well as of transformation, family and forgiveness
