Small Boats by Vincent Delecroix

Small boats by Vincent Delecroix

French fiction

Original title – Naufrage

Translator – Helen Stevenson

Source – Review copy

I said yesterday I had only asked for one review copy. I had asked for two as this wasn’t out, but it came very soon after the longlist came out. it was maybe the book that caught my eye from the titles, as firstly I hadn’t heard of the book other than seeing it had been down for the Prix Goncourt a few years ago. The writer is better now as a philosopher and has also written translations of works by Kierkegaard. It is a book that tackles one of the things that causes a lot of argument,s immigration, and those trying to sail from France into the UK on these small boats. I prefer the French title, not quite as subtle as court it is the French word for Shipwreck. A nod to the book and what happens

While she was playing me the recordings, the policewoman sometimes stared hard at me, sometimes gazed out of the window at I know not what, because from my signal station all I ever saw was the sea, and given a choice I would much rather, like today, look out at a stretch of road with a building site, some workers, Africans mostly, but at least they were alive, not wet and chilled to the bone, not women, not children, so I was ok looking at all that, while they played me the recording of the voice saying Please, please and me saying Calm down, help is coming.

But hope never came and she is arrested for the deaths

The book follows one. A single boat, one small boat, of the many that every day cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the English Channel. What happens to many of these boats when they run into trouble? When there are too many people on the ship. I kept thinking, especially when I knew the French title of the book, The Great French Painting, The Raft of the Medusa, that would be gripping to the raft after a boat has sunk. Well, this isn’t a piece. For French art, this happens daily instead of dead bodies hanging from trees like in Simone’s Strange Fruit. These are bodies that wash ashore on the shorelines!  So what happens when high figures in the French government try to single out a single Coast Guard official on the day when the 27 souls who died on this small boat were lost at sea? It follows who is to blame. Then, in the book’s middle part, it sees those souls as they drown in the middle of the Channel.The book is  a book that made me think and also get so angry about this whole subject.

They had to wait till nightfall to put the boat in the water, a wide, semi-rigid Zodiac, six metres long, with a flimsy deck and a spluttering outboard. They didn’t know each other, or hardly. Some had come via Turkey or the Balkans and had possibly never seen the sea, some had already made the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean. They had squatted around Calais; most of them were Kurds, a few Africans. There were two women and a little girl. They shuffled around on the edge of the dunes without looking at each other, hardly spoke. Then the signal came and they moved forward on the beach. To their left, further down the coast, another group was creeping towards another dinghy.

Imagine the fear ebeing in. a small dingy in the dark as supertankers and container ships cross your path!!

This is a book that looks at one group of deaths but in that way captures the whole problem of who is to blame for these deaths. I often think that a blind eye is turned to this. I can’t see the problem. We may need to be a little more compassionate and look at a way to get people who want new lives to those new ones! I hate it when I hear of people spitting sand, threatening lifeboat men for saving immigrants whose boats have sunk or are sinking due to those trying to make money off those with no money chasing a dream of a better life. Even writing this post, I am getting wound up This is a subject I feel needs addressing, not just people blaming someone like a single coastguard. This is maybe the most thought provoking book on the longlist for me this is the =perfect book club book as it really shows people views when they read this as it is hard not to be moved significantly in the middle section but also about the blame that isn’t always that one persons fault as they are p[art of a system with there collective head in the sands. Do books ever affect you in this way !!