Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is a stark, tragic novel which confronts the moral bankruptcy and paralysis of Western humanism and liberalism. Set against the backdrop of desperate migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France — many fleeing war, poverty, persecution or societal collapse that are consequences, in part, of Western imperial and geopolitical meddling — the novel challenges the indifference and collective responsibility of France and the United Kingdom squabbling over who is responsible while lives continue to be lost. These “small boat” crossings began in earnest around late 2018.
Delecroix bases his philosophical novel on a real event: the November 2021 tragedy in which a dinghy carrying thirty-three migrants sank after its engine failed and water poured in. Passengers made repeated distress calls to the French regional monitoring and rescue centre, only to be met with bureaucratic coldness and inertia. The indifferent female voice at the end of the line referred the migrants to her British counterparts. Twenty-seven people, including women and children, died.
“It really wasn’t me that asked them to leave, if that was one of the mistakes they were accusing me of, but what mistake exactly? Because after all I might have said to any irresponsible person out sailing, to the cretin who takes to the waves regardless of the weather conditions or who doesn’t know how to handle their dumb little sailboat and is gobsmacked to find themselves in trouble, and panics, and the entire French Navy has to be called out so they don’t get a dunking.” [page 25]
The novel is structured in three parts. It opens and closes with the perspective of the rescue centre employee who took the calls and failed to intervene, part one being her interrogation by a police officer investigating the incident. A young single mother she describes, in part three, how she used to love the sea “that is black as Hades,” and how she has tired of calls for help from migrants, her compassion eroded by exhausting nights of repetitive procedures underpinned by world-weary cynicism.
Sandwiched between these sections is the grim account of the sinking itself, told from the viewpoint of the migrants on board, notably a young man repeatedly calling the rescue centre, to no avail. Delecroix lays bare the banality of evil and the shared culpability of France and the UK whose political finger-pointing has left human lives adrift.
“Slowly the young man turned his head. The sea had turned slate grey, just as hostile or indifferent as before. Now he could see the distant shape of the boats, red ones, black ones, passing in a kind of white mist, indifferent as the ones that had gone before, and seeming to belong to another world. The endless, brooding sky loomed like a cliff. His legs were like stone and he could hardly move them; his neck was rigid with cramp. Then his breathing began to speed up, without him realising, as if someone was pressing down on his chest to expel the air. He breathed no air in; jolting, his heart began to beat frantically, juddering, slamming up into his throat. He couldn’t keep his head up and his chin slumped into the water. He sensed this time that the waters, losing patience, were closing over him.” [page 92]
‘Entente Amicale’
In light of this week’s three-day state visit by Emmanuel Macron — the first by an EU head of state to the UK since Brexit — the resonance of Small Boat becomes all the more tragic. Amid diplomatic fanfare and fine talk about how both countries must come together to strengthen Europe, the English Channel remains a watery grave for the desperate, the displaced and the discarded. As guests at the royal banquet held in Windsor Castle toast a new era of friendly relations, yet another inflatable dinghy takes on water off the Kent coast . . .
Vincent Delecroix’s novel spares no one as it exposes the dead-eyed political pursuit of vote-winning policies that allow these deaths to continue. Is the just-announced one-in one-out trial scheme the solution? So long as the underlying issues remain it’s unlikely. The novel’s icy, shifting perspectives mirror a real-world duplicity — two nations playing jurisdictional tennis with human lives while narratives of deterrence and populist sovereignty take hold.
The statistics don’t lie: there have been at least four major sinkings in 2024, causing approximately fifty-six deaths, and so far in 2025, at least three fatal incidents have occurred, with numerous unconfirmed or missing. Numbers that are growing, and are abstract, until a novelist, like Delecroix, makes you sit and experience the dying breath of a young man choking as he slips under the waves.
As the far-right Reform UK party makes electoral gains with its anti-migrant rhetoric, the core moral question Small Boat raises remains: what kind of civilisation ignores people drowning within sight of its shores? The answer is yet to be found. Vincent Delecroix is not just a writer but a philosopher, and it shows. His novel — shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize — reads less like fiction and more like an existential meditation on the value and meaning of life.
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