We are in the same boat brother

Vincent Delacroix’ book, Small Boat, short listed for the 2025 Booker is a philosophically fictitious version of an incident that occurred on the night of November 23/24, 2021. An inflatable dinghy, overloaded with thirty migrants, capsized, drowning 27 refugees.  Small Boat is a startling, unexpected book that philosophizes, as much as exposes the frailty of the human condition today.

By Meher Pestonji in Mumbai

It’s a calm night on the English Channel. As on most calm nights, several small boats are trying to cross from France to England. Some make it, some don’t. Coast guards rescue those in trouble.

Vincent Delacroix’ book, Small Boat, short listed for the 2025 Booker is a philosophically fictitious version of an incident that occurred on the night of November 23/24, 2021. An inflatable dinghy, overloaded with thirty migrants, capsized, drowning 27 refugees.  Did the coast guard do enough to save them? Small Boat is an interrogation of the coast guard by the French police.

The book opens with a startling quote.  “I didn’t ask you to leave. It was your idea. And if you didn’t want to get your feet wet you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water. I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your leaky wretched boat, and now the waters up to your ankles. I get it you’re frightened, you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.”

An evidently frustrated coast guard is muttering to herself, but the microphone is accidently on and her voice carries to the authorities. Her interrogation by the French police forms the crux of the book.

Delacroix turns the light into the mind of the unnamed French coast guard, a single mother who leaves her five-year-old daughter with her parents to get on with her job. On any clear night as many as 40 boats try to make the crossing. Cries for help are routine.

Can a coast guard afford the luxury of personal reflection while on duty?

The police officer, is presented as a mirror image of the young woman, making the interrogation as much an internal dialogue as an investigation. It starts with questioning the coast guard’s altruism.

Did she have no feelings for the people, including a small girl, on the boat? What are her views on migrants?  Was she without a conscience?

In defence she states that her job requires her to be professional, make no distinction between a luxury boat or a dingy full of migrants. She is trained to fish people out of water, migrant or millionaire, without getting involved in their lives. In her job emotion, conscience prevents you from acting fast.

The police officer wants facts. Boats normally take 90 minutes to cross the strip between France and England. Radio transmissions show people calling for help for three hours. What was she doing for three hours? Why was a cargo ship 20 kilometers away not dispatched on a rescue mission?

The transmission records her asking for the dingy’s geo-location saying “calm down, help is on the way”. They were in French water with currents pushing them towards the English side. She alerted her counterpart in England, told the frantic migrants to call 999, the English number, then left it to the British to take over.

The English authorities rescued 98 migrants on that fateful night, but, on the French side, 27 were allowed to drown. Bad for optics. Someone is answerable.

As the police inspector takes a coffee break, the protagonist switches her mind away from her surroundings to her daughter sleeping in bed. Each night, while tucking her in, cries of migrants resound in her ears, hallucinations of drowning people float in the child’s soup bowl, flailing arms emerge from her own morning cuppa. 

Hiding the turmoil of her inner world she faces her father, proudly murmuring ‘my daughter saves lives’ -- without an inkling of the price she pays. To hang onto sanity, she runs seven kilometers on a deserted beach each morning before sunrise.

In a powerful poetic voice, she asks, when did these people’s actual sinking begin? “Who is banishing them, scattering them across the surface of the earth and sweeping them towards the sea where they vanish like dust shaken from the coat tails of humanity….what gigantic sweep of a broom in Africa or Bangladesh or Afghanistan. I’m not the one holding the broom….throwing them into the rubbish bin of the English Channel.”

Who is truly responsible for the deaths of migrants?

The sea?

Migration policies? The refugee tracking mafia? War? Famine?

As a sea traffic warden she is merely “a small cog in a machine that malfunctioned…a machine that ends up erasing the human aspect…”

In the next chapter Delacroix delves into the last hours of migrants battling freezing waters where “there was nothing but empty blackness, the obsessive repetitive rhythm of waves, the vastness of it all.”

Ethic differences dissolve as humans cling together in the effort to survive. Using fading mobile batteries they frantically appeal for rescue, holding on to the end of a rope, to the deflated tube of their leaky boat, life jackets keeping them afloat.

“Bodies felt like one indistinct mass, a kind of insensate almost alien block of wood to which they were manacled.”

The focus shifts to a young survivor who has phoned the coast guard 14 times within minutes. Delacroix  paints a vivid picture of the man’s plight: “…heart racing uncontrollably… crushed by cold shudders running through his body like electric shocks, he kicked his legs, the weight of his shoes dragging him down….though shaking uncontrollably he concentrated on calming his breathing, slowing his heart… but the calm achieved by a painful effort of concentration was deceptive, unreal.”

The coast guard has grown up loving the sea, “…the one thing humans haven’t managed to tame in a thirty thousand years” -- but she is aware that “you can’t really love the sea if loving means trusting, not fearing.”

In the last section Delacroix reveals her vulnerabilities. The monologue caught by the damning transmission reflects her ex-husband’s views, urging her to change her thankless job. His words persist in her head to emerge in unguarded moments. She refuses to be considered a monster just because she sounded irritated at one point of time, remembering the number of people she had saved in the past.

But the police inspector, who is also her conscience, thinks she is avoiding responsibility. ”Don’t you find it obscene when 27 people have died through your fault to  feel sorry for yourself when surely we should be feeling sorry for them,” she demands.

Delacroix zooms in on the coast guard’s inner turbulence on viewing the geo-location screen night after night. “I see a small boat sinking, a mother screaming, people frozen to the bone frightened…. Using all those devices, the instruments, the little series of numbers, the little luminous squares hopping imperceptibly, carrying 30 people packed so tight together you wondered how they could possibly fit in one tiny square.”

The nature of the device is to distance and deaden emotions.  Impacting mental health.

Each night the young mother pours out her angst to her child, obviously too young to comprehend, but not too young to escape being traumatized. The child has nightmares, fantasizes that the boy who called 14 times may have swum to safety. The father gets concerned about the child’s mental health, considers taking her away.

Again, to hold together the suspended coast guard with unlimited time on hand, who runs on the beach, through the morning haze, alongside the sea which she now views with terror. One morning the haze shapes into a man jogging along the wave line. He is joined by another. They are not jogging but walking towards her. She recognizes survivors from the shipwreck. She is not afraid. She steps into the water, toes, ankles, knees, going deeper and deeper….

A startling, unexpected ending for a book that philosophizes as much as exposes the frailty of the human condition today.

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Meher Pestonji is a writer, poet and social activist based in Mumbai. She has been a journalist writing on multiple social issues, theatre, literature and art, and she has worked in several grassroots and civil society campaigns for the rights of the marginalised, for women’s rights, housing rights of slum dwellers, with street kids, among other campaigns. Her books include Mixed Marriage and Other Parsi  Stories, Pervez, Sadak Chhaap, Piano for sale, Feeding crows, Outsider.  Her other books include Being Human in a War Zone, Can Poetry Halt War, Offspring and Poems.