DARCY DUBELL reads Vincent Delecroix’s Booker-shortlisted forthcoming novel, translated by Helen Stevenson.

 

Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix’s fourth novel, navigates the uneasy waters of public complicity. It drifts between fiction and non-fiction, philosophy and folly, grief and guilt—never quite anchoring itself. 

Jeremy Harding, writer, journalist and contributing editor at the London Review of Books, sets the tone in his introduction: “Vincent Delecroix’s compelling novel raises the unsettling possibility that each of us is complicit in the suffering of migrants.” This quiet indictment haunts the narrative which never lets the reader drift too far from the water’s edge, or the unfolding “Migrant Drama” at sea. 

The novel draws its tide from a real-life tragedy:  

“In November 2021, where an inflatable dingy 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 insisted that the migrants 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.”

Into the seams of this event, Delecroix threads his fiction. The primary narrator is the woman at the French CROSS (Coastguard) call centre, who received—or rather, ignored—the distress calls. Fourteen missed calls later, with twenty five bodies scattered in the dark swell, their gripped hands finally untethered from each other, she is accused of professional negligence. But she refuses culpability: She didn’t send them to sea. 

The novel is fragmented into three currents which spiral back to the moment of drowning. In the first section, the CROSS worker speaks in a voice heavy with institutional detachment. Her indifference is chilling, but also disturbingly familiar—recalling the coarse tone of media headlines which saturate our feeds. Apathy treads the waters of indifference, which the reader is quick to deny. One cannot help but think: what sort of autobiographical pact is this?

In the second section, Delecroix gives the migrant the helm: unnamed, faceless, but momentarily central, he suggests that he is Kurdish, but could also be African—this seems to matter. He becomes the boat’s guide, armed only with a phone as a makeshift compass. That phone, held aloft in the black water, becomes the most poignant symbol of the novel: connection, hope, and a last resort. But even that signal fades too soon.

The voice on the other end is relenting:

“There are guys like you everywhere tonight, forty small boats supposedly sinking at the same time in the Channel and I can’t see to everyone at once. So you’ll have to be patient, love, or tell all the others that are sinking to calm down and get off their phones so I can just look after you; you go ahead and call the others, since you’ve got a phone, like all those people climbing into battered old boats with no compass or flares.”

And then silence. 

The second section is engulfed between the first and final ones, which are both narrated by the CROSS worker,as though fiction also wants to look away from the mother who clings onto her daughter so as not to lose her in the depths of the sea. Their stories disappear beneath the waves, as they all seem to. 

By the third section, the reader is back on dry land, but not at ease. Performative empathy seeps into the CROSS worker’s narration—a  tone true to reality, reflective of the hollow ritual of reposts, petitions and a shared wallowing in someone else’s sorrow. The narrative implicates us, throws us into the water, where a system of tragedy becomes as routine as a repost. 

And yet, you can’t swim, because these bodies float everywhere:

“Back home, when I kiss my daughter, I taste salt on her mouth, and see little inflatable boats in her soup, tiny arms emerging from her soup.” 

Delecroix’s Small Boat reckons with the fraught waters between apathy and responsibility, asking whether fiction can truly bear the weight of such loss without being capsized by it. How does one narrate indifference and suffering in the same breath? 

As Lucretius remind us, perhaps we are all just shoreline spectators: 

Suave mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, 

E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem. 

Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, 

to gaze from the shore upon another’s great 

tribulation.

Small Boat is set to be released on 23.04 with Small Axes. Featured image courtesy of the publisher.