BY ANNE CROWLEY
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAID:
“In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy 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 wrongly told the migrants they 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.
[This is a true story, detailed in the book’s introduction, including conversations recorded among the boat’s occupants and marine rescue officers in France and UK.]
“The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.” Source: Reading Guide for Small Boat, published on the Booker Prize website.
MY THOUGHTS:
What a gob smacking, gut-wrenching story – both the real and fictional versions!
The book is in three parts: the first, apparently a police interrogation of the French marine rescue officer (the narrator) who received the refugees’ calls for help and failed to act; the second, the harrowing experience of the refugees on the boat as it filled with water and ejected them into the sea; and in the final, we are inside the marine rescue officer’s head as she interrogates herself.
She appeared to be inhumanely cold and indifferent, refusing to be apologetic for her callous remarks – “I didn’t ask you to leave”. “You will not be saved”. She said she had no opinions, no thoughts on the refugees. “[In my job] I’m required precisely not to have convictions or a conscience.”
Regarding the sinking, she expressed exasperation and indifference. Boat people should have been calm and patient, “instead of continuing their endless pointless pleading … instead of calling 14 times in two hours to say they were sinking, instead of annoying me by saying it over and over again as if it was me that didn’t understand when I did…Your feet are in the water, but it’s English water, not French.”
Despite being astounded and disgusted by her heartlessness, through attempting to understand how she could have become so, I felt some sympathy for her. “When had the sinking begun? I was just the last link in the chain.” Part of the author’s message is that we are all accomplices and bystanders in the suffering of refugees and the situations that make them so. I take the point.
And the narrator’s perception of empathy struck a chord: “You can either have it and do nothing, or act without it, but you can’t act with empathy”. I disagree, but I recall that as a trainee nurse, some of the more experienced nurses expressed a similar view. It was a self-protection mechanism to prevent themselves becoming too personally affected by others’ suffering – one that emerges when someone is burnt out by constantly facing misery they can’t avert.
In the end, despite her protests about having no conscience, I think her doubts about this prompted the very deep, circular personal interrogation she underwent to try to understand herself and how she had come to act as she did. The outcome of this is vague, but my interpretation was she found herself wanting.
