Migrants are people too – this intricate novel shows why
4 star review in The Telegraph link here.
By Cal Revely-Calder, Literary Editor, 17 March 2025
Small Boat, an International Booker-nominated story by Vincent Delecroix, turns reallife tragedy into morally complex fiction.
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, f loating 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”.
