Vincent Delecroix - Naufrage (Gaillimard, 2023) ****½

In November 2021, when a migrant boat sank in the English Channel, twenty-seven people died. Despite their numerous calls for help, the surveillance centre failed to send help. Inspired by this real event, Vincent Delecroix's novel, a work of pure fiction, raises the question of evil and collective responsibility, by imagining the portrait of an operator at the centre who may also have been shipwrecked that night.

The whole weight of the migration crisis is put on the shoulders of the narrator, a telephone operator in France who somehow completely misjudged the calls for help coming in. She gets interviewed by her superiors and by the police to understand what truly happened. She gets accused with all the wrongs of this world, including racism, extremism, lack of human compassion. Throughout the dialogues and plot all other possible causes for the death of these people are included: the lack of democracy and prosperity in the countries from which these migrants fled in the first place, the lack of political will by France and the UK to help solve the problems in the countries of origin, the lack of adequate support in the country in which they arrive or pass through, the suboptimal control of small boats leaving the continent to the UK,  the lack of insight by the people themselves to step into ramshackle boats with too many other people,the lack of agreements on when the French or when the UK coast guards have responsibility to answer emergency calls, etc. The whole world fails, and basically everyone is to blame, yet the young woman gets grilled by the media and her direct environment. 

The novel power is to have crystalised this broad sense of guilt on this one individual, whose knowledge and training are clearly suboptimal. Instead of looking for solutions or showing empathy with the victims of the boat incident, one single individual gets all the blame. Delecroix holds a mirror to society and to the reader. Despite the programmatic and political character of the book, it is sufficiently well written to sympathise and sometimes despise the narrator. She is not perfect, for sure, and that is of course the power of the ambiguity that Delecroix creates.