The book’s introduction, by British writer and journalist Jeremy Harding,  lays down the factual record of the real-world events that inspired this work of fiction. Harding sets up the novel’s concern with Bureaucracy as a Disguise for Moral Failure: A maritime rescue protocol, executed correctly on its own terms (the boat was geolocated; the neighboring authority was notified; the file was closed), produces 27 deaths and a tidy archive. Harding’s phrasing, “French duty officers may have breathed a sigh of relief,” catches the tone the novel will inhabit, the relief of a professional whose paperwork is in order.

Harding quotes the real-life dispatcher’s off-microphone aside, “Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved. ‘I’m up to my feet in water’? It wasn’t me who told you to leave,” and later isolates the line “You will not be saved” as the utterance that will haunt the novel. Delecroix builds his fictional account—a conversation between a fictional dispatcher (the narrator) and a fictional policewoman who may be a figment of the narrator’s imagination—around that enigmatic statement. Though the policewoman views this statement as evidence of the narrator’s moral depravity, the narrator argues that the real transgression is less against the people on the boat (who may or may not have heard it) than against the listening public, who needed her to absolve them by performing the script of rescue regardless of whether rescue was coming. 

From her first sentences, the narrator relies on bureaucracy as a disguise for moral failure. She insists, “I’m required precisely not to have convictions or a conscience” (14), strenuously enforcing a boundary between her professional identity and her personal, moral identity. This boundary is no less important to her than the all-important boundary between French and English territorial waters. In her telling, when she is on the job she is nothing more or less than an extension of the French government, whose protocols dictate her actions and whose capacity to act ends at the border. She tells the policewoman that her judgment “has no holes in, no fissures, but it does have boundaries, which correspond exactly to the boundaries of territorial waters” (27). The maritime border in the middle of the English Channel becomes a symbol of the absurdity of bureaucratic order in the face of disaster. All borders are imaginary, political constructs, but borders on land at least sometimes correspond to geographical features like rivers and mountain ranges. They can be marked by walls, fences, or checkpoints. The sea border exists nowhere but on a map, and the narrator’s absolute faith in the reality of this imaginary line illustrates the inadequacy of bureaucratic responses to human tragedy. This sets up the later transfiguration of the sea in Part 3, when the narrator will describe the sea as an elemental, malevolent force bent on undoing all human attempts to impose order on chaos. 

The narrator’s image of the nightly news as a recurring play, “Migrant Drama, sometimes Migrant Tragedy” (6-7), captures her view of The Complicity of Spectators. She contends that she is being investigated not for failing to help the migrants but for failing to reassure the audience in this ongoing performance. The viewers want the words of rescue spoken correctly, in order to absolve them of guilt. The dispatcher is their representative. Her role is to voice their concern, their empathy, to reassure them of their essential goodness; whether rescue actually happens is a different matter, handled offstage. By positioning herself “in the front row” (7), answering a phone on stage, she makes herself both spectator and participant. She has the capacity to affect what happens on stage, but she is not affected by it. Her colleague, Julien, reading Pascal and answering distress calls with “Vous êtes embarqués” (22), maintains a philosophical distance that even the narrator finds excessive. The policewoman, too, is implicated by the resemblance the narrator keeps noting, “the same hair pulled back,” “the same expression” (pp. 4, 24). To question the operator from across the desk is to occupy the same posture she did at her console: watching, registering, not getting wet.

Even as the narrator continually insists that she has no opinions or feelings regarding the migrants, that her human personality does not exist in the context of her job, her feelings leak through in her tone and choice of words. By the time she hears the voice of the man on the phone, she believes she has already heard everything he could possibly say: 

I knew his voice by heart, what he was saying, too, because in reality it's always the same man calling. Every night, the same voice, the same pleas, because it doesn't matter how many times you pull this idiot out of the water, back he comes—one time, ten times, a hundred times. (8)

This conflation of all migrants into a single composite character is an expression of professional burnout. Her job is to rescue people in distress at sea, but no matter how many she rescues, there are always more, making the work feel Sisyphean. Though the causes of this burnout are as much structural as personal, the impact is that she participates in The Dehumanization of Migrants. She fails to see the caller as a human individual because she no longer has the emotional capacity to do so. This failure contributes to the choices that lead to 27 deaths.