["The Roots of Heaven"] should delight those readers who have lately assailed the French novel as over-introspective, pessimistic, and morbid. Romain Gary is a believer in life, action, freedom, an idealistic lover of exotic nature and of beasts. His heroes are the elephants of Equatorial Africa.

Morel, a Frenchman who endured the horrors of German concentration camps, emerged from his nightmarish experience as a crusader for all that mechanically enslaves or crushes men, animals, and nature in the modern age. He undertook a campaign to preserve the roots of heaven, as they are called in the Islamic world, planted by God in the depths of the human soul. (p. 15)

The complex story is told through a series of monologues by half a dozen characters, the chief ones being a kindly skeptic, Saint-Denis, who sympathizes with Morel's idealism, and a priest, who stands clearly for the late anthropologist and...