The migrant crisis, as it is sometimes called in the UK, or the small boats issue (a far less worrisome-sounding phenomenon) is a difficult topic at the best of times, one that causes much handwringing and headshaking from the liberal left or (at worst) from the farthest right, downright racist responses in which human beings are headlined as insects. Indeed, successive British governments have had to put their immigration manifestos front and centre, along with health, crime and education, in order to be taken seriously by the electorate.
It’s not surprising then that the 2010’s and 20’s have seen a small swathe of adult, young adult and graphic novels tackling this subject, often from the migrant perspective. But Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat (translated from the French by Helen Stevenson and nominated for the 2025 International Booker Prize) is an altogether different beast, based on a real-life incident and narrated (in places like a philosophical treatise on the (in)humane) by a rescue operator who took calls from a boat which eventually sank and killed 27 men, women and children (not a spoiler as this is no mystery).
The book moves through three acts, sections or movements. It’s difficult to know what to call them because Small Boat is not a novel in the conventional sense. The first and longest part explores a psychological account of a police interview/interrogation of one rescue operator and her responses to a series of calls from the stricken craft, the key issues being why she did not attempt to send a rescue boat and what she said to the increasingly panicked caller. The middle section of the book is a no-frills account of the small boat sinking and the agonising final hours of its passengers. The final section, told through an internal monologue of the operator whilst staring at the sea, is possibly the most brutal: a judgment of her own, the migrants’, and global society’s culpability in this tragedy and the continued tragedy of the planet’s various immigration crises. Facing the sea, she thinks and then screams,
Had my voice carried far enough to be heard, to be recognised as the voice of all of us? I put my hands back together once more and, taking a deep breath, I yelled: I did not ask you to leave. . . . Don’t you get it? You will not be saved.
While it’s impossible to do any book justice with a quotation or two and a few hundred words of commentary, Delecroix’s deceptively slim novel is a dense exploration of private and public guilt and humankind’s unsavoury appetite for moral scapegoating, a work that feels particularly resistant to review of plot, character and theme. But the shift in pronoun above from “my” to “us” is symbolic of one of the book’s most uncomfortable aspects: namely, the repeated idea that, while it might be convenient to point the finger of blame at one person or one government, one criminal organization or even one country, the uncomfortable truth the book leads us to is that,
There is no shipwreck without spectators. . . Even with their eyes shut, people are still watching, and I can’t think of a single one who could say: I wasn’t there.
Amongst the praise on the back of the paperback, Gillian Slovo’s seems most pertinent. She calls Small Boat, “A gripping story of an everyday monster that shines its light back on us and our refusals to face what is happening in our world.”
This reminds me of W. H. Auden’s brilliant meditation on Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” Neither ploughman nor shepherd pays the slightest attention as Icarus’s pale legs disappear into the water.
Meanwhile, the bombs fall, whole schools of children are wiped out, and the world wrings its hands, shakes its head, shares an angry post or two, then gets on with its day. More devastation, more homeless, more dead, and more future victims, as Delecroix predicts, for “the sea with its guts glutted with women and children.”
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