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The Wire
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Adrift in Conscience: ‘Small Boat' Navigates Guilt and Apathy, But Finds No Just Shore
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories 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. Illustration via Canva. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now 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. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News An Open Letter: 'I Have Small Eyes, Mr Prime Minister' Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' – Translated By Deepa Bhasthi – Is 2025 International Booker Prize Winner Humour, Scepticism and the Realities of the Familial in Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' Most Indians Can't Even Afford Entry-Level Cars. 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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.
Scroll.in
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Shortlisted for 2025 International Booker Prize: An excerpt from ‘Small Boat' by Vincent Delecroix
Stories written by Vincent Delecroix Translated from French by Helen Stevenson, in this novella, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes. How and why did it happen? Vincent Delecroix &
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'.
