Peace to the Pachyderms

THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN (372 pp.)--Romain Gary--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

The wise old elephant, it seems,

Is seldom troubled by bad dreams . . .

On the basis of this British undergraduates' ditty, French Novelist Romain Gary has constructed a modern fable, and good fables, like nursery rhymes, must command belief. As a man of action (he was a hero of the French air force, is now French consul general in Los Angeles), Author Gary understands this well, has written his story in the idiom of documentary journalism. It is completely successful--one of the best narratives to be published in a long time. The Roots of Heaven has won one of France's highest literary awards--the Prix Goncourt --doubtless for the very French way in which it brings politics into the jungle and the jungle into politics.

On the surface, the book (its setting is French Equatorial Africa) tells the adventures of a dentist named Morel who becomes obsessed with the notion of protecting wild fauna from hunters. But Novelist Gary is really concerned with "another animal who needed protection"--man. Elephants to Morel are "the last and greatest living image of liberty that still existed on earth." Man, in the midst of his bad dreams of extinction by nuclear warfare, simply cannot afford to allow a noble form of life to be needlessly slaughtered. Morel has learned his respect for dignity in a hard school--a Nazi concentration camp, whose philosophical commandant well understood that National Socialism was a materialist revolution aimed at man's spirit. In the name of this spirit, Morel takes up the cause of the vanishing elephant.

Tusk Force. To most, Morel is half-crazed, a crank at best, his pro-pachyderm activities comic and futile. But Gary wonderfully evokes what the elephants mean to Morel, so that his actions to protect them become a "hymn of hope." Morel hates those who have made a fashion of the safari--"impotents," "alcoholics" and sexually frustrated women. The hunters' bullets stay inside the hides of the beasts for years; wounded elephants pitifully use their trunks to plaster mud on the suppurating bullet wounds.

To avenge this, Morel burns villages, destroys a plantation owner's house and an illicit tannery specializing in wastepaper baskets made of elephants' feet; in a desert cabaret he arranges to have the backside of France's most famous woman hunter publicly whaled. By this time Morel has allies. Somehow his gesture toward saving the elephants has attracted the world's attention. Like Albert Schweitzer, Morel has become a symbol for those discontented with the quality of modern existence. His allies, in the nature of things, are an odd lot. His personal Maquis, or tusk force, consists of a refugee girl, victim of multiple rape in the liberation of Berlin, a Danish naturalist, a U.S. magazine photographer, and a nuclear scientist who has just refused to go on helping to make the basalt bomb. Each in his own way understands something of Morel's strange passion.

Symbolic Tree. Two ironies intrinsic to Morel's position defeat his tragicomic crusade. One is that he is fatally a man. The animals he loves flee from him just as fast as they would from Robert Ruark or a fearless M-G-M crew. His briefcase, stuffed with pro-elephant manifestoes, is made of animal skin. He has defied man's fate but cannot escape it. The second irony is political: Idealist Morel becomes a tethered goat in the big game hunt of nationalist ambitions. A cruelly clever, Paris-educated Negro named Waitari exploits Morel as a convenient scandal to embarrass France. To Marxist Waitari--who is sick of Africa being "the world's zoo"--an elephant is meat for the hungry and ivory to finance the class war. Morel disappears in the jungle, victim of an unfathomable destiny. Novelist Gary leaves the last word with a strange Jesuit who thinks of the state of grace as a "biological mutation, which will in the end give man the organic means to make himself what he wants himself to be." To the Jesuit, Morel's life is a sort of mad saintliness. The book ends with the priest's contemplating a tree with its "infinite complexity of branches ... his favorite sign on earth, before even the sign of the Cross." Author Gary seems to take his philosophic position--a kind of nature-minded humanism--under the tree's thin shade. But philosophy aside, Gary writes brilliantly, like one of those natural chefs of fiction who can make a palatable filet mignon out of a hunk of elephant.

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