Helen Stevenson

Vincent Delecroix

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix's fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

Small Boat

Recursive, which was the point, but still a little tedious

Regan Martin

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is based on a real tragedy—namely the sinking of a migrant vessel in the English channel on 24 November 2021, where 28 people died trying to cross from France into England on an inflatable dinghy. It is one of many deadly migrant crossing disasters from that year, and the tragedy of small boat sinkings continues to the present day, as refugees make treacherous journeys abetted by people smugglers in search of a better life. It is a highly sensitive topic and one that requires a level of nuance and respect, and one can imagine a million different ways in which writing this novel could go completely wrong. Even on initially picking this up I had major concerns as to whether the political dimension of the book would be handled in a way that is both sensitive to the topic whilst remaining unique and thought-provoking, without delving into cliche or choir-preaching. I was therefore very glad to have my doubts proved wrong.

Rather than writing about the individuals who boarded the boat, Delecroix instead focusses (mostly—we’ll get to that) on a woman working in the French coastguard rescue monitoring station (“CROSS”) in Cap Griz-Nez. Some background to the chronology of the tragedy is given in the very useful introduction by Jeremy Harding: the boat departed the French coast sometime before midnight, but it soon found its engine dying and inflatable ring deflating. The passengers dialled English and then French authorities. At first, responsibility was diffused due to jurisdiction—the boat was near the French-English divide in the Channel, and both countries assumed the other would be performing the rescue operation. When the English boat communicated that their vessel was further away than the French, the French operator chose not to send their boat. The passengers continued to call to request for help—over a period of multiple panicked hours—and yet no French vessel was sent to their location. Recorded in the operations centre, the rescue operator says privately to her colleagues: ‘It wasn’t me who told you to leave’ and ‘You won’t be saved.’ 

So it is this speaker who Delecroix inhabits, in a part-reality, part-fictional retelling of the events and the proceeding investigation. Our narrator is a divorced mother who cares deeply about the welfare of her child, but is not convinced of her guilt in the situation. Stylised as a longform police interview, in which the narrator is interrogated by a suspiciously similar looking policewoman, we are taken through questions and responses to determine the ultimate outcome: who is to blame? And in serving the story’s philosophical function there’s no attempt by Delecroix to give the narrator the realistic voice of an actual rescue operator (for which I’m thankful); instead, Delecroix, principally a Kierkegaard scholar, gives us philosophical quandary after quandary in a long dialogue reminiscent of the Socratic method.

At an initial level, the reader will be offended by the narrator’s blasé and, frankly, evil indifference as they list off all the other things that were more to blame than her: the migrants themselves of course, for putting themselves in such a treacherous position (a colleague in CROSS is introduced as a philosopher-turned operator who seeks to see the suffering of the world; to the question of why migrant boats find themselves in the position he quotes Blaise Pascal “You are embarked”); and then, perhaps, the social conditions that cause migration, society—the sea itself? One is immediately drawn to Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the ‘banality of evil’—that inhumane moral decisions can be reached by regular people just following authority. And there is an element of that—migrants are de-individualised in CROSS, treated as a logistical challenge which can only be achieved by the optimal allocation of resources. But how could it operate otherwise? How else could its team endure the emotional trauma of recognising that every dying person is a human just like them? Or is this justification just another way of avoiding guilt?

At one level, then, it is philosophical investigations into guilt and responsibility in migrant boat crossing tragedies. If it ended at that, I think it would be a passable novel and as much as I would expect given the synopsis. However, what I think is the great strength of the novel is that it delves critically into the nature of philosophy in response to tragedy, and the psychological impulse to use philosophy as a defensive mechanism to distance oneself from uncomfortable truths about human suffering. For throughout the novel, alongside the philosophical diatribe the narrator gives the policewoman, there is an undercurrent of severe psychological distress, with the narrator being frequently distracted, often undergoing water- and boat-based visual hallucinations, which adds a further layer of complexity to the novel, especially when considering the novel’s ‘purpose.’ For one could make many criticisms of the novel’s subject and approach (And I have seen them—not limited to ‘who should be telling the story’ and ‘who should the story be about’), but these criticisms, I believe, are deflected by Delecroix’s complete commitment to seeing the concept played out to its full extent. 

It speaks about causality, the diffusion of responsibility, and the banality of evil, yes, but it also engages on a more critical level: how do we use philosophy to get us out of ‘feeling’? How do we use language? What is the difference between the CROSS operator’s inaction and our own, as regular humans? Is the novel just another form of allaying our liberal guilt? On a meta-level, by understanding the inability of a novel to address problems, is this in itself a way of diffusing responsibility? All of these questions are brought up in such a short amount of space, and I think Delecroix handles it with great care and skill.

This is Vincent Delecroix’s first published fiction and I am very impressed. A philosopher by trade, he has given us a philosophical novel that, like the best philosophical novels, keeps one thinking. I would love to see him explore further topics in further work, but for now I’m certain that this was my favourite of all of the Booker International shortlist.

shain

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is based on a real tragedy—namely the sinking of a migrant vessel in the English channel on 24 November 2021, where 28 people died trying to cross from France into England on an inflatable dinghy. It is one of many deadly migrant crossing disasters from that year, and the tragedy of small boat sinkings continues to the present day, as refugees make treacherous journeys abetted by people smugglers in search of a better life. It is a highly sensitive topic and one that requires a level of nuance and respect, and one can imagine a million different ways in which writing this novel could go completely wrong. Even on initially picking this up I had major concerns as to whether the political dimension of the book would be handled in a way that is both sensitive to the topic whilst remaining unique and thought-provoking, without delving into cliche or choir-preaching. I was therefore very glad to have my doubts proved wrong.

Rather than writing about the individuals who boarded the boat, Delecroix instead focusses (mostly—we’ll get to that) on a woman working in the French coastguard rescue monitoring station (“CROSS”) in Cap Griz-Nez. Some background to the chronology of the tragedy is given in the very useful introduction by Jeremy Harding: the boat departed the French coast sometime before midnight, but it soon found its engine dying and inflatable ring deflating. The passengers dialled English and then French authorities. At first, responsibility was diffused due to jurisdiction—the boat was near the French-English divide in the Channel, and both countries assumed the other would be performing the rescue operation. When the English boat communicated that their vessel was further away than the French, the French operator chose not to send their boat. The passengers continued to call to request for help—over a period of multiple panicked hours—and yet no French vessel was sent to their location. Recorded in the operations centre, the rescue operator says privately to her colleagues: ‘It wasn’t me who told you to leave’ and ‘You won’t be saved.’ 

So it is this speaker who Delecroix inhabits, in a part-reality, part-fictional retelling of the events and the proceeding investigation. Our narrator is a divorced mother who cares deeply about the welfare of her child, but is not convinced of her guilt in the situation. Stylised as a longform police interview, in which the narrator is interrogated by a suspiciously similar looking policewoman, we are taken through questions and responses to determine the ultimate outcome: who is to blame? And in serving the story’s philosophical function there’s no attempt by Delecroix to give the narrator the realistic voice of an actual rescue operator (for which I’m thankful); instead, Delecroix, principally a Kierkegaard scholar, gives us philosophical quandary after quandary in a long dialogue reminiscent of the Socratic method.

At an initial level, the reader will be offended by the narrator’s blasé and, frankly, evil indifference as they list off all the other things that were more to blame than her: the migrants themselves of course, for putting themselves in such a treacherous position (a colleague in CROSS is introduced as a philosopher-turned operator who seeks to see the suffering of the world; to the question of why migrant boats find themselves in the position he quotes Blaise Pascal “You are embarked”); and then, perhaps, the social conditions that cause migration, society—the sea itself? One is immediately drawn to Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the ‘banality of evil’—that inhumane moral decisions can be reached by regular people just following authority. And there is an element of that—migrants are de-individualised in CROSS, treated as a logistical challenge which can only be achieved by the optimal allocation of resources. But how could it operate otherwise? How else could its team endure the emotional trauma of recognising that every dying person is a human just like them? Or is this justification just another way of avoiding guilt?

At one level, then, it is philosophical investigations into guilt and responsibility in migrant boat crossing tragedies. If it ended at that, I think it would be a passable novel and as much as I would expect given the synopsis. However, what I think is the great strength of the novel is that it delves critically into the nature of philosophy in response to tragedy, and the psychological impulse to use philosophy as a defensive mechanism to distance oneself from uncomfortable truths about human suffering. For throughout the novel, alongside the philosophical diatribe the narrator gives the policewoman, there is an undercurrent of severe psychological distress, with the narrator being frequently distracted, often undergoing water- and boat-based visual hallucinations, which adds a further layer of complexity to the novel, especially when considering the novel’s ‘purpose.’ For one could make many criticisms of the novel’s subject and approach (And I have seen them—not limited to ‘who should be telling the story’ and ‘who should the story be about’), but these criticisms, I believe, are deflected by Delecroix’s complete commitment to seeing the concept played out to its full extent. 

It speaks about causality, the diffusion of responsibility, and the banality of evil, yes, but it also engages on a more critical level: how do we use philosophy to get us out of ‘feeling’? How do we use language? What is the difference between the CROSS operator’s inaction and our own, as regular humans? Is the novel just another form of allaying our liberal guilt? On a meta-level, by understanding the inability of a novel to address problems, is this in itself a way of diffusing responsibility? All of these questions are brought up in such a short amount of space, and I think Delecroix handles it with great care and skill.

This is Vincent Delecroix’s first published fiction and I am very impressed. A philosopher by trade, he has given us a philosophical novel that, like the best philosophical novels, keeps one thinking. I would love to see him explore further topics in further work, but for now I’m certain that this was my favourite of all of the Booker International shortlist.

Small Boat

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