About this audiobook
Joseph looks back on his childhood in a Swiss town, where music and the church choir were important parts of everyday life. He remembers his friendship with Betty and the events surrounding an unusual organ builder's arrival. The visitor's ideas about children's voices begin to give familiar rehearsals an unsettling character, and Joseph finds himself drawn towards a mystery connected with the instrument.
Jules Verne tells the episode through recollection, allowing a child's excitement and anxiety to shape the atmosphere. Musical notes become nicknames, a source of companionship and a way of imagining that people might be fitted into a system. What first seems merely eccentric gradually takes on a more disturbing significance.
The story combines humour, affection and fantastic unease. It offers a different view of Verne's imagination, concentrating on the border between a musical invention, an adult's ambition and the fears that make a childhood experience remain vivid long afterwards.
