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Daily Maverick
10-06-2025
- Daily Maverick
Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference
The deadly results of detached officialdom are made painfully clear in this harrowing novel. There's a particular kind of story that's rarely executed well – one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that's the evil. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat – a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson – is that kind of story. Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking – in French, in English, in Kurdish – for help. They didn't get it. What is known and not imagined in Delecroix's pages is that both the French and British coastguards received their calls. And both hesitated, passing responsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction. The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect. Delecroix doesn't give us the migrants' stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned – not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence. She listens back to recordings of her own voice on the rescue line, promising help that would not come, offering assurances she did not believe. She is left to reckon with the unbearable fact that someone, somewhere (was it her?) spoke the words: 'You will not be saved.' She isn't especially monstrous. She's tired. She's professional. She has a young daughter at home and an ex-partner who sneers at her work. She runs on the beach to decompress. In one of the novel's most arresting turns, she compares herself to a mass-produced tin opener: efficient, functional, affectless. Delecroix draws her with enough delicacy that we cannot quite hate her. And that, of course, is far more unsettling. Reading Small Boat, I thought – as one inevitably does – of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. Not evil as grand spectacle or ideology, but as administration, the quiet conviction that one is simply fulfilling a role. Arendt coined the phrase watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann organised the trains but claimed never to have hated the passengers. What Arendt saw was not a monster but a functionary – and that, of course, was the point. I thought, too, about my own work as an anthropologist researching forced displacement across Ireland, Turkey and Australia. I've sat with people whose lives are shaped not by violence in its cinematic form, but by violence as policy: the hotel room without a kitchen, the letter that never arrives, the bed that's taken away with no warning. I've heard a senior Irish official describe the state's provision of housing and support for asylum seekers as 'sufficient'. Meanwhile, people, stateless and waiting, are asked to prove their vulnerability again and again until even their grief is suspect. Institutional indifference The institutionalisation of indifference: that's the real story here. The smugness of protocols. The liturgy of duty rosters and shift reports. It wasn't evil that let those people drown in the Channel – it was ordinary people in warm offices citing rules, filling forms, following scripts. We can see the birth of such indifference in policies like the UK's abandoned Rwanda plan, which casually proposed outsourcing asylum itself, as if refuge were a commodity. Delecroix's brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. By women with mortgages, men on night shifts, people who've learnt to sort calls for help by urgency, credibility, accent. 'Sorting,' the narrator explains, 'is perhaps the most important part of the job.' Not all distress calls are equal. And the assumption – always lurking, never spoken – is that some lives are more likely to be saved. At one point, the narrator's colleague, Julien, answers calls from migrants by quoting Pascal: 'Vous êtes embarqués.' You are already embarked. A fatalist shrug disguised as wisdom. As if to say: you should have thought of all this before you left. The shrug does the work of a policy, the quotation the work of a wall. And yet, the narrator cannot fully perform indifference. She is haunted by the sea. She remembers loving it as a child. Now, it terrifies her. She feels it watching her, pursuing her, wanting to surge past the shore and swallow the continent whole. She runs along the beach to quiet her mind – a run that is almost the same length as the journey those on the dinghy tried to make. If Small Boat has a flaw, it's that it sometimes flirts with making guilt into its own form of lyricism. But this too may be deliberate. It is easier, perhaps, to feel sorry than to feel implicated. And far easier to narrate moral confusion than to prevent its causes. What Delecroix has written is not a redemption story. It's not a psychological thriller. It is a chamber piece for one voice and many ghosts. There are no grand gestures here, just small refusals, small failures. And the small, flickering boats of each human life, drifting towards – or away from – one another in the dark. In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix's novel is a necessary and merciless indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too. DM First published by The Conversation. Fiona Murphy is an assistant professor in refugee and intercultural studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
Hindustan Times
17-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
It's not a winning title. And as titles go, Small Boat is a small book too. Just 160 pages. Three sections. Vincent Delecroix's International Booker Prize shortlisted novel is a work of fiction from start to finish. But it stems from a real-life incident on the chilly night of November 2021, when an inflatable boat, en route from France to the United Kingdom, capsized in the Channel, whilst still in French territorial waters near Calais and Dunkirk. Here's where Vincent Delecroix's story begins. Small Boat is a fictional account of the event, narrated by the woman coastguard who took the calls on the French side. Accused of failing in her duty and facing an inquiry, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Her part internal monologue, part uncomfortable conversation makes up the thorny first section. This isn't a neat little Netflix re-enactment about What Happened That Night. Phone records show that among the woman's many exchanges with the freezing migrants, are the statements: 'I didn't ask you to leave,' and 'You will not be saved'. In addition, the investigating police officer also happens to look like the woman, perhaps 10 years older. It's a genius device – the investigator serves as both the mirror and the conscience, while the coastguard may well be a synecdoche for France. The woman insists that she's neutral, that she's trained to view the life of a migrant as no more or less valuable than that of a stranded heir after a party on a yacht. She rationalises that being efficient is more useful than being empathetic in rescue operations. But it is callous insensitivity hiding behind indifference. The notion that humans, making treacherous crossings to safer shores are 'so caught up with not wanting to die', irritates her. Her 'I didn't ask you to leave,' is not what sank the boat. But Delecroix's narrator has no remorse – she's haunted not by corpses, but her own recording playing over the evening news. It's the inspector who often struggles to find the right words to say. The French-to-English translation is elegant. At one point the woman admits, 'I failed to make the distinction when I should have. And when I shouldn't have, I made the distinction'. But the testimony is at best, a thought experiment, philosophizing an ethical dilemma that shouldn't be a dilemma at all. There's a brief Section II, a sharp, quiet description of the drowning, for anyone who needs reminding of what migrants risk for a chance at a hard life in a safer country. Small Boat closes with a look at other players in the story – the coast guard's far-right ex, Eric, their young daughter Léa, and Julien, the cynical but complacent colleague who was on duty that night too. It's a reminder of the banality of evil. Like soldiers at Auschwitz who claimed to be just doing their jobs. Like the Delhi Police who let a corpse lie on a road for 14 hours in 2010 while they argued about jurisdiction. Like the officials at UP's Government Railway Police and Bareilly Police Station after a man had been run over by a train in 2015 – they squabbled for so long over who should collect the body that by the time they picked it up, another 16 trains had run over the corpse. Delecroix's book is not about the culpability of one woman; it is that we are all culpable. The author is a philosopher. Expect some spiralling passages about the difference between presuming innocence and proving it. But look past them too. Saving lives is not that complicated.
The Hindu
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of International Booker Prize-shortlisted Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
What is it like to live under tyranny? Why do so many people flee their homes? Who is responsible? Distraught at the descent into chaos in several countries and the West's indifference to the plight of migrants, Irish novelist Paul Lynch imagined a country (in the West) teetering on the brink, thanks to a totalitarian government, and the choices his protagonists are forced to make in his 2023 Booker Prize-winning book, Prophet Song. Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr traced the impact of 72 men arriving in the small town of Sicily in The Silence of the Choir (2017). They are 'immigrants', 'refugees', 'migrants' or 'exiles', but everyone in the Sicilian town calls them 'ragazzi' or 'the guys', and this encounter with 'The Other' forces some reflection from the local people: to shun or welcome them? Now, French philosopher and writer Vincent Delecroix has turned fact into fiction in his thought-provoking lean novel, Small Boat, translated by Helen Stevenson and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Moved by a true story of a drowning in the English Channel in November 2021 — an inflatable dinghy carrying at least 29 migrants, including children, capsized, leading to the deaths of all but two — Delecroix raises uneasy questions about who is to blame for the tragedy. In our darkest hour Divided in three parts, the novel begins with a call for help to a radio operator with the French Coast Guard on a cold winter night, and her decision to not do anything about it. After most of the migrants drown — the second part of the novel has the harrowing details — the operator, who narrates the novel, is questioned by a policewoman. As the recording of the night is played back, five words she spoke to the migrants come back to haunt the operator: 'You will not be saved.' In his Introduction to the novel, British journalist Jeremy Harding writes that 'this may have been the narrator's darkest transgression: to have denied the comforting assurance of rescue... so that 'humanity need not doubt its humanity''. A debate about guilt ensues in the mind of the narrator. Several questions bother her; such as, for instance, why do men, women and children drown every night in the English Channel or the Mediterranean? When did the sinking start? To her, the migrants were sunk long before they sank. 'Their sinking didn't start in the Channel, it started the moment they left their homes.' Who is to blame? As her interrogation continues, the narrator wonders about its cyclical nature and why their deaths are pinned on her. 'Back we came to the idea that the cause of their death was — me. In other words, not the sea, not migration policy, not the trafficking mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan — me.' Delecroix hits harder with the 'banality of evil' argument, with the narrator pointing out that the voice on the tape is not that of a monster or a criminal — 'it's the voice of all of us'. All of us who are blind to the suffering of others, whether at sea or on land. In the end, the narrator concludes that whether they drowned or not didn't matter; 'what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them'. In an interview to Delecroix says he found it easy to penetrate the narrator's mind: '...I progressively realised that I could really be her — and act and speak like she did.' As Harding contends, Delecroix's compelling novel raises the unsettling possibility that each of us is complicit in the suffering of migrants. Small Boat Vincent Delecroix, trs Helen Stevenson Small Axes/Simon and Schuster ₹399
Telegraph
17-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Migrants are people too – this intricate novel shows why
If you're at sea level, and of average height, the horizon is about three miles away. At its narrowest point, the English Channel is about 20 miles wide. Hence, if you're halfway between Calais and Dover, and even if you're sailing on heavy swell, you'll sight no land to the north or south. Such, we can imagine, was the experience of 33 migrants, heading in a dinghy from France to Britain in the early hours of November 24 2021. Their engine failed; the boat took on water; they repeatedly called for help from the cliffs they could no longer see. None was sent. All but two survivors drowned in the Channel, which, in due course, threw 27 corpses back onto France's shore. This event, re-imagined for fictional purposes from the migrants' point of view, comprises the second of three parts in Small Boat, a short and relentless novel by Vincent Delecroix. It's the Frenchman's fourth book, but his first to be translated into English; as Naufrage (Shipwreck), it was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, and the International Booker has now longlisted Small Boat too. (In publishing it here, Small Axes joins And Other Stories and Les Fugitives as the best guides to new fiction from overseas.) Delecroix is both a novelist and a Kierkegaard expert; both pursuits lend themselves to the imagination of ethics at crisis point. Think of Small Boat as a philosophical ghost-story. The drowning scene is patient and cool: 'The growing light did nothing to warm them, but it roused their spirits slightly, as though they were actually emerging from the abyss and from their ordeal, as though they had survived and their victory was definitive. Some of them, floating on the water, were already dead.' Yet this is also the shortest section and the only third-personal one: the first and last parts of the novel are told, or rather thought, by a coastguard radio operator, also a fictionalised version of a real-life figure, who's being interrogated by the police. Small Boat is about failures of several kinds, and their centrifugal form: how attributing blame for what happens to migrants can only lead us into the political register to which Delecroix's title, in English, belongs. (What Britons uniformly call 'small boats' are known in French by a range of names: 'embarcations gonflables', 'bateaux de fortune'.) The accusation faced by the operator is that, despite taking several calls from the panicking migrants, she failed to dispatch a rescue boat because she judged they were almost in British waters – at which point her counterparts would be responsible. Nor did she heed the British request to send a French boat first, their own being on assignment some distance away. (There's wounded pride in the policewoman's anger that not only did the French lose those 27 lives, but the British, elsewhere in the Channel, saved 98.) Worst, the operator was recorded grumbling aloud to a colleague, as she ended one call, 'I didn't ask you to leave' – a recording that's now the lead item across the newspapers and TV. But the operator refuses to take the blame, or accept that blame should be personalised. What she asks, infuriating her interrogator as only unanswerable questions can, is 'when this sinking started'. What she means, she clarifies coldly, is that 'they were sunk long before they sank'. The disaster, to her, had a web of causes, from the migrants' own decisions to the greed of the smugglers exploiting them; or the British society that offers them – so they're promised – milk, honey and benefits; or even the upheaval in their homelands that drove them here, some of which was spurred by the very countries to which they've come. Such causes are denounced or promoted or overlooked according to political taste. So yes, she reiterates, you might say, 'who's asking them to leave?', and not mean it rhetorically. Names and quotations drift through the novel, often cited by the operator in an irritable, sarky tone: Pascal, Eichmann, Christ. (What could I have done in the end, she wonders – 'sing Nearer My God To Thee down the radio?') Her interrogator would rather cleave to legalities: she hammers away at whether the operator 'assessed the situation correctly', framed by the latter in sceptical italics, in English as in the French. Full marks to Helen Stevenson's translation, understated yet alert, catching the to-and-fro of these vocal currents, as the interview rolls testily on. Where Delecroix's coastguard recalls muttering to a colleague that the sinking migrants are 'gonflés' (cheeky), and he quips back 'dégonflés' (deflated), Stevenson renders the words as 'cheeky' and 'leaky'. The rhyme translates with unpleasant ease. Small Boat's only problem is structure. The drowning sequence reads dreadfully well, but sits awkwardly in the drama of guilt, or non-guilt, that both precedes and follows it. Delecroix's philosophising has a powerful pull; stronger, even, than the witness of death. Odd as it might seem, I would have better felt the weight of his point – that migrants, simply, are people, and their lives, however easily forgotten, are equal to yours and mine – had we never met the migrants themselves. In the first and third sections, they hover in the dialogue, and that voiceless presence, in the words of the living, has an insistence of its own. One answer to the coastguard's question – 'Who's asking them to leave?' – is 'no-one'. Another is 'all of us'.
