Adrift in Conscience: ‘Small Boat' Navigates Guilt and Apathy, But Finds No Just Shore

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30-05-2025

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Adrift in Conscience: 'Small Boat' Navigates Guilt and Apathy, But Finds No Just Shore
Suvanshkriti Singh
14 minutes ago
Vincent Delecroix's Booker-shortlisted novel probes bureaucratic cruelty and moral fatigue. Yet, its vision remains troublingly narrow, haunted more by moral posturing than ethical clarity.
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For a book that was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, French philosopher Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat seems to have flown almost completely under the literary radar. Translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel is a fictional account of the drowning of 27 migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France into England. It is inspired from a real event, and reconstructed from the forensic data produced as part of its public investigation.
Despite its politically relevant subject – or, perhaps because of it – hardly a handful of major English language media outlets, including those in India, have spared it any considerable thought. Those that have, have commended Small Boat for its moral stance; few have interrogated its ethically ambiguous politics on the racialised violence migrants experience.
Vincent Delecroix's
Small Boat
Small Axes (2025)
The novel is narrated from the point of view of the unnamed French coast guard officer who received distress calls from those attempting the ultimately failed crossing. She is being held accountable for their deaths due to her refusal to send help despite receiving 14 calls in the span of two hours.
She insists her inaction was based on the simple, concrete fact of territorial jurisdiction: the dinghy with the migrants had crossed over into British waters, and all she could do was to inform her English counterparts of the situation, which she did.
The first part of the novel sees the narrator being interviewed by a policewoman, strikingly like herself in appearance, demeanour, and tone of voice – later revealed to be the former's own conscience. This externalisation of internality is a deft narrative device; it allows Delecroix to paint the portrait of a weary, haunted woman through his political and philosophical arguments.
Bubbles in her coffee appear to the narrator as sinking boats, and yet out loud she asks if the true cause for the dead migrants dying was not 'their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.' And, surely, she cannot be held responsible for their choice to migrate. Or, perhaps, the cause was the under-funding of rescue services, necessitating difficult decisions about resource allocation. All the narrator did was her job in the way she was trained to do, she insists – without the professional handicap of emotions or opinions. A true and mere functionary, but one unable to rid herself of visions of African construction workers sinking in a sea that has encroached inland.
Delecroix is clinical and unsparing in his condemnation of the banality of evil, the bureaucratic production of inhumanity, and its psychological toll. But, the primary aim of Small Boat is to take to task the ubiquity of apathy, and the complicity of Every(wo)man in the making of what we end up calling a tragedy.
The novel uses the figure of the narrator as the insider who calls out society on its indifference, both through the novel's indictment of her own impassivity and her narratorial defence of it. Delecroix resolutely portrays the narrator as a burdened, enervated woman whose inaction, in a different context, could perhaps be forgiven. She is not so much vile as pathetic; no more a monster than anyone – which is everyone – who deems themselves a neutral, unobligated party to crises happening to other people.
However, the novel's moral posture is its greatest limitation, for it gets in the way of its ability to take an ethical stance. Significant portions of the novel read like liberal fantasy, where the admission of guilt relieves one of any reparatory obligations: absolution through self-flagellation.
The plot's resolution involves the narrator committing suicide. Unable to bear her guilt or to rationalise it away, she walks into the English Channel. Violence begets violence, but justice is nowhere in sight, nor is any notion of what it might look like.
The moment of resolution is presaged by one of Delecroix's sharpest insights. The narrator concludes it is not her actions but her words that have condemned her: it is in the expectation that she would reassure the migrants they will be saved – and not in their actual survival or death – that society had unsuccessfully sought its redemption. But, coming as it does after repeated attempts on the part of the narrator to deflect responsibility, reaching for every explanation other than her own racial antipathy, the critique loses some of its bite.
Then, there is the novel's second part: a detailed, but trite description of the hours-long drowning. Delecroix writes – or Stevenson translates – his migrants as featureless, racialised bodies. They are human only insofar as the bruising experience of closely witnessing their suffering. This is trauma porn barely disguised as liberal humanism. The novel is prey to the same tendency of which its narrator is accused – an inability to conceptualise migrants as individuals outside of their victimhood.
These perversities reveal further frailties. Despite its philosophical nature, the novel often misses opportunities for original, innovative critique. Consider the narrator's claim that her 'judgment has…no fissures, but it does have boundaries, which correspond exactly to the boundaries of territorial waters.' Minimally, it offers an occasion for examining individual responsibility against structural forces. At best, it is an opportunity to reckon with the validity of the structure itself. But, having glimpsed the possibility, Delecroix forgoes it, focusing instead on rhetorical empathy.
Similarly, for all its erudite musings about racial violence, the novel never really asks why it is so that the experience of migrants arouses concern only when their victimisation finds its completion in death. This, despite such a line of inquiry being amply indicated in the narrator's assertion that 'these people were sunk long before they sank.'
Its flaws are not insignificant, and for many, Small Boat won't be a book that moves – it wasn't for me. It may even be one that incites pessimistic helplessness, if not cynicism. This may have something to do with its intended audience being primarily White. But, literature has the great advantage of being universal; it can always be read in the context of one's own circumstances. If the fates of those crossing the Channel seem too distant as a subcontinental reader, one can always recall the Rohingya refugees India abandoned in the Bay of Bengal.
Despite its imperfections, this is still a well-written novel that warrants reflexive conversation through its own questioning, quietly suggesting that we hold both ourselves, and the political structures we legitimise, accountable for our complicity in the suffering of our others.
Suvanshkriti is a journalist and researcher. She has a master's in European Studies from the University of Göttingen, Germany, where she specialised in the literature and politics of migration and citizenship. She writes about books, gender, sexuality, democracy, and global justice.
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