Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference

Daily Maverick

a day ago

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.