15-05-2025
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
