Review of Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix

This slim (122-page) novel builds from a real-life tragedy to a deep, disturbing, fascinating exploration of morality, responsibility, chance, circumstances of birth, and judgment and empathy. I was intrigued by the unsympathetic narrator as well as the thought-provoking, unflinching, pointed questions directed at the reader.

Vincent Delecroix takes a grueling set of real-life events and builds a short, powerful, thought-provoking novel that plunges the reader into its plausible, gripping details--as well as the complex emotions, responsibility, morals, and considerations around the situation and more broadly, our world.

In 2021, an inflatable boat carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the English Channel, and all but two of the 29 people on board died.

The vessel contacted French authorities with desperate pleas for help. They were told they were in British waters and must ask the UK for help--but that was untrue.

Small Boat is told from the fictionalized point of view of the French navy officer who refused the passengers' pleas for help.

Delecroix imagines a scenario in which the naval officer willingly comes forward for a police interview and details the conversations that ensue--increasingly emotional on the side of the police, and increasingly calm on the side of the woman who was manning the radio. Yet Small Boat is far more than an exploration of the moral dilemmas within, justifications around, and aftermath of the greatest loss of life in English Channel history.

In undulating, haunting turns of events, Delecroix forces the reader into the incredibly unsympathetic point of view of the faulted naval officer. The police and the narrator each consider whether she was negligent by incompetence or intent. They discuss whether her indifference to refugees' suffering adds to her condemnation or, as she asserts, if having become immune to impassioned pleas is essential to her job of indiscriminately saving lives. She is angry at the many desperate people who set out in leaky boats and then ask for her help, while realizing that she is employed for the purpose of coordinating life-saving assistance. She is damned by the callous, cruel (and recorded) words she spoke regarding the impossibility of saving the boat load of passengers while signing off from the fateful caller the night he and his boatmates died. But she asks whether the words or sentiments matter, particularly when considered against the thousands of lives she has helped save in the line of duty.

Delecroix crafts an intriguing scenario in which the narrator sees distinct physical similarities and mannerisms common between herself and the police officer who is execrating her, which calls into question whether the interview is real or whether the narrator is embodying both sides of the situation and exploring both the accusations against her and her defenses for the deaths and her responsiblities around them.

Within her cold, self-involved persona we begin to see hints of empathy as she builds (unfair) correlations to her own life, the safety of her own child, and her own plights. Without redeeming the naval officer, Delecroix poses uncomfortable questions to the reader about their own culpability, their own empathy's limits, and their own likely willingness to step in and take desperate measures. The novel considers not only situations at sea, out of range of most of our immediate awareness and assistance, but also for example the highly visible, numerous unhoused, hungry figures we regularly encounter and the other in-need people who surround us.

I found this disturbing and absolutely fascinating.

More Books to Explore

Vincent Delecroix has published ten works of philosophy and eight works of fiction.

Explore these links for more Bossy reads around refugees, morality, and more short books that pack a punch.