Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
A small boat, or an inflatable dinghy to be precise, carrying 29 people, capsizes in the English Channel, leaving 27 dead. The last few words one of them hears is that of a rescuer saying “I didn’t ask you to leave”. The words are cold, cruel, matter of fact, and just as unfeeling as the waves about to swallow them.
Author Vincent Delecroix wastes no time in introducing the ‘grey’ nature of the protagonist in his novel ‘Small Boat’. It is told from the perspective of a French coast guard officer, a woman whose recorded response to an SOS call from a migrant can be immediately read as a troubling lack of urgency to help. So when the boat goes kaput, and 27 bodies are washed ashore, it becomes easy for authorities to pick a scapegoat. But is she a scapegoat, or did she deliberately ensure no help came to the immigrants desperately trying to get to the UK?
Well, since ‘Small Boat’ is narrated in the first person by the woman in question herself, she proves to be an unreliable narrator. She is called in for questioning by the police over the migrant deaths and readers get to listen to her defense. By the end, you cannot decide if there was deliberate malevolence on her part or just an inbuilt indifference fuelled by exhaustion that led to her not taking the SOS call with the urgency one would expect. As the pages unfurl, she fairly argues that a rescue operator cannot be expected to be emotional when dealing with cries of help. But do they need to go an extra step and be callous about it?
Sample the opening sentence of ‘Small Boat’ and you’ll get a slight sense of her character –
I didn’t ask you to leave, I said. It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, 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 wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and 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’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.
If you go hiking in the mountains, fall on the trail from a height, and feel like you will die soon, the last thing you need when you call for help is to hear “Calm down love, I didn’t ask you to go get your feet into the wild, if you didn’t want to get lost, you shouldn’t have stepped out.”
You know those books that people say ‘you’re either going to love it or hate it’? Well, ‘Small Boat’ probably falls in that category. If you enjoy books that dive into the mind of a morally grey character or simply an out-and-out villain, this should be your next pick. Because if there is one thing you can be sure about the narrator of ‘Small Boat’, it is this: she is a condescending prick.
The ‘Small Boat’ narrator isn’t necessarily a dumb white ‘Karen’ (the popular slang term for extremely entitled middle-class white woman, like the protagonist of ‘Yellowface’), and shows striking clarity and intelligence in some of her arguments, but a lot of her racial prejudices are inherent, without her admitting to them. To say something like “I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb,” to a drowning migrant is proof enough of her staggering entitlement and lack of empathy.
Sample this other sentence from ‘Small Boat’, where she talks about why she joined the navy: I didn’t enlist with the Navy to save the migrants sloshing about on the rail tracks of Pas-de-Calais, that’s for sure, but if I’m asked to do it, or to help do it, I do. So don’t then ask me what I think, deep down, about these people, or rather about their obsession with flinging themselves into the water in search of I know not what. Also, I have to do it with the means available, and … I cannot send out dozens of dinghies, speedboats, patrol boats or forty helicopters to save forty small boats at the same time. You have to prioritise.
Her logic isn’t wrong, everybody appreciates a professional who does not differentiate between the people they’re dealing with based on their race, financial standing, or whatever markers there are. It’s amusing how she almost positions herself as a sort of God, someone who gets to decide who to save, and how to save them. In her words, she gets to ‘prioritise’. On the other hand, she will also slip in a sentence where she clearly lets her bias show. By using terms like “These people” for the migrants, she is already discriminating against them. For her, they are outsiders. And author Vincent Delecroix excellently illustrates how these supposedly ‘unbiased’ rescue officials see the world from their own lens.
Sometimes the narrator almost fools you into buying her argument, you think that maybe she was just caught saying the wrong thing on the wrong day. But then she will start spinning bizarre philosophical arguments about how some migrants are simply destined to die in the ocean. Her constant moral reasoning, defensiveness gets repetitiveness by the second half, making one wish other voices were present. There is a striking little break in the story, where the reader is presented a migrant’s version, that of a young man who constantly called the narrator asking for help. It’s a great narrative detour, but simply too short.
‘Small Boat’ is one of those books, where the story’s reception is highly dependent on the reader’s reaction. For instance, I found several swathes of the novel darkly hilarious, but it’s easy to imagine how others might not find anything remotely funny about its content. The climactic moment is open-ended, cliched, and ends the narrator’s tale in a way which doesn’t sync with her character. But well, regardless, this is an interesting read, one that takes little time to finish. Once you start reading it, you might finish it without having to leave home.
Rating for ‘Small Boat’: 4 on 5 stars.
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