Books Review - Small Boat

French philosopher Vincent Delecroix’s searing fourth novel weaves a short, sharp shock of a story out of tragic real events. Under nightfall on November 23 2021, an inflatable, ill-equipped dinghy carrying more than 30 people set off from France on the perilous journey across the Channel to the United Kingdom. Between midnight and 1am, the British coastguard informed the French regional monitoring and rescue centre, known as Cross, that a small boat was experiencing difficulties in French waters. 

At 1.45am the Cross team heard from the desperate passengers who sent them their geolocation via WhatsApp. They were in French waters but the staff decided against a rescue mission and handed it over to Dover because the boat was a kilometre from British waters. The same passengers kept calling Cross. Shockingly, the female radio operator was recorded making denigrating remarks and, during one panicked telephone conversation, speaking off-microphone to her colleagues, she said: “You will not be saved.” At 5am Cross signed off the dinghy as “rescued”. Only two people survived and 27 bodies were recovered, including that of a child — the largest single loss of life in the Channel since official records began in 2018. Following the catastrophe, the French police questioned the staff on duty at Cross that night. 

In Small Boat, nominated for the Prix Goncourt and now, in Helen Stevenson’s expert translation, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Delecroix takes as his starting point the facts published in the newspapers and the transcription of audio recordings which, he says, “were the only matters from which I authorised myself to imagine and construct a corresponding character”. 

The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, Delecroix imagines the fictional perspective of the female operator during the police interview. She is resolutely matter-of-fact; we get no sense of shame, only bewilderment that she is being blamed. Delecroix gets under the skin of his protagonist; entwining her responses to the interview with her fragmented thoughts and feelings allows the reader to form their own verdict. She ponders why they consider that “the cause of their death was — me . . . not the sea, not migration policy, not the trafficking mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan — me. My judgment, to be precise.” The police officer concludes that she was either “negligent” or acted with “murderous intent”. The operator responds by arguing that empathy is “an idiotic luxury indulged by people who do nothing, and are moved by the spectacle of suffering”. 

The harrowing middle section is told from the perspective of the passengers, and Delecroix recreates their final moments in chilling, unadorned prose: “Their faces took on a blue, chalky pallor. There was a ringing in their ears and a kind of continuous stupor overcame them, an irresistible lethargy, which they mistook for calm and the subterranean, indestructible continuity of the vegetative state.” 

In the final part, the operator, suspended from her job, persuades herself that her thoughts, recorded that night, do not constitute “the voice of a monster or criminal on the tape — it’s the voice of all of us.” Her reasoning reminds us of the growing indifference to the plight of refugees; the despair of people fleeing war, injustice or poverty in search of a better life. Worse, Delecroix suggests, is the belief that those attempting to reach the UK by crossing the Channel somehow deserve their fate as a consequence of abandoning their home country. Small Boat opens with the operator’s comment: “I didn’t ask you to leave.” 

Delecroix’s powerful and timely meditation on this disturbing rhetoric is a damning indictment of apathy in the face of calamity, and recalls Hannah Arendt’s treatise on moral responsibility and the “banality of evil”. Arendt’s phrase referred to Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust who exhibited no guilt at his trial and claimed he was just doing his job. In Small Boat the operator, even while referencing Eichmann’s inhumanity, denies any culpability. She wonders why she has been scapegoated for the tragedy and, refocusing attention back on us, concludes: “There is no shipwreck without spectators.” 

Originally published by the Financial Times