Why does the elderly narrator Joe spend his days playing only Beethoven on the “free” pianos to be found in Paris railway stations? Who is the woman he keeps hoping to encounter, and is she part of some idealised dream?

For much of this novel I imagined that Joe is a gifted pianist who has been traumatised by two events during his adolescence: witnessing the explosion on landing of the plane carrying his parents and “insupportable sister”, and his subsequent despatch to the aptly named “Les Confins”, a grim boarding school for orphans run by the Catholic church in a remote spot on the French border with Spain. This is run by L’Abbé, a sadist who singles Joe out for psychological torture, after his Oliver Twist-style error of introducing himself by “asking for more”, that is a single bedroom instead of a dorm and salad for starters. Sensing that Joe is desperate to play the piano in his study, L’Abbé sets him to work using his digital dexterity to type endless letters for him, under strict instructions never to raise the piano lid. When he suspects Joe of a lie to avoid incriminating another boy, L’Abbé cunningly manipulates Grenouille, his brutal caretaker, in the knowledge that he will subject Joe to physical violence in revenge.

In this take on a well-worn theme, the harshness of the regime at Les Confins is so repetitious as to seem tedious – one becomes inured to it, rather like most of the boys. This is not relieved much by the moments of black humour, or Joe’s identification with and conversations with Michael Collins, the astronaut who circled the dark side of the moon while his colleagues undertook the first moon walk in 1969, and other surreal incidents. Take the occasion when “the Vigie”, the gang to which Joe is admitted, sneak up on the roof to experience the violent wind which blows through the valley “once every three years”. Wedging his feet under a low parapet, Joe spreads his arms wide like wings, to experience the sensation of flying, and freedom. With echoes of “Le Grand Meaulnes”, Joe eventually falls in love with Rose, the spoilt daughter of a rich benefactor of “Les Confins”, to whom Joe is forced to give piano lessons. It can be quite hard to keep up with the author as he flits between scenes.

Many of the incidents are implausible, the characters stereotyped and exaggerated. Yet by the end, the author succeeds in suggesting that L’Abbé himself was once an abused orphan who genuinely believes that it is necessary to punish his pupils to bring them to his version of belief in God, while Grenouille is probably suffering from an old soldier’s PTSD. One has to suspend disbelief over the fact that the fifteen-year-old Joe, son of a comfortably off family, would have been packed off to Les Confins when he was so close to being old enough to go out and earn a living. So much of the book is devoted to his two years spent at the school, that there is too little space to cover the half century he spent with the freedom to come into his inheritance and work as a music teacher, which would have “restored the balance” in real life.

However, Jean-Baptiste Andrea is less interested in realism, except perhaps to move us over the plight of orphans who suffer long-term damage through abuse. Instead, he is more focused on using his quirky style to go off at a tangent on flights of fancy, and observations on life. So this is a novel likely to divide opinion sharply. He is a talented writer, so although I did not care for this particular plot, I shall probably attempt another of his novels, hopefully on a different theme. Best read in French if possible, I suspect……