The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, by Giles Waterfield

Stephen Bayley is delighted that someone has written the hilarious museum comedy he planned

When, during the Eighties, I worked in a huge national museum, I was so taken by the comedic possibilities of daily life that writing a sitcom came to mind. Simple reportage would have realised a hilarious series of screenplays. There was the day the Queen was visiting and I, coincidentally, had to import a .45 Thompson machine-gun (rate of fire: 725 rounds per minute) from the Royal Army Museum for an unrelated activity. I whooshed up to the main entrance, and stepped out with the deadly weapon. The security staff merely said: "Good morning, sir," and waved me and my machine-gun through.

One day the flamboyant director had a photo-call with a priceless drawing, except the museum had mislaid the original so he had to pose with a postcard. It was said that mere possession of a clipboard was sufficient token of authority, and that one would license any act of theft or vandalism.

One day a scaffolding pole decapitated a Renaissance sculpture. At Christmas, crates of booze were trucked into the publications department, said to be back-handers from grateful printers receiving orders for unsellable catalogues. The Trustees were an odd bunch too. A shipping tycoon once came into my office and cheerfully smoked a good cigar that my father had given me for my birthday. Another day, an ancient aristocrat breezed in to ask if I could negotiate discount at the Northampton branch of Habitat.

A museum incorporates every nuance of snobbery, careerism, costive apathy, sexual opportunism, spiteful scholarship, political shiftiness and Olympic bottom-kissing. All these are minutely calibrated in hierarchies rigidly enforced by civil-service routine, scholarly prejudice and sadistic or humiliating security. The two things you do not get much of are energetic intellect or aesthetic sensitivity.

In fact, it is, to me, one of the beguiling paradoxes of our civilisation that close contact with sublime works of art does not cultivate gentility, sensitivity, humanity, but those very qualities of snobbery, careerism, costive apathy, sexual opportunism ...

All this is treated very amusingly in Giles Waterfield's second novel (the title refers to a controversial detail in a Gainsborough). As one-time director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, he has travelled through this world successfully and, recollected in repose, deals with it mercilessly. He has written that sitcom.

The structure is based on a big day for BRIT (the toe-curlingly re-branded Museum of British History): there is a sweaty Trustees' meeting, an opening (with scandal attached), and a gala dinner. This allows Waterfield to indulge in delicious caricatures of the personalities. People in the museum business reading The Hound will recognise many characters, or composites, taken from life.

There is the chairman of the Trustees, Sir Lewis Burslem, a rich, ambitious, Philistine brute who treats the museum's director with disdain. The calculated rudeness – not knocking on doors to express power – is so well observed that I am sure it is first-hand. The director, the accomplished (but calculating) Auberon Booth, is, with a view to his next appointment, more concerned with a favourable power-balance and good PR than with the artistic purposes of the museum.

These become the province of the painfully hip exhibitions person, Lucian Bankes, a repulsive empire-building poseur. Waterfield has a sharp eye and clear ear for the vanities of public position. His definition of the cant term "sound" is a small masterpiece. He must have suffered terribly to be able to remember all of this.

There's an odd mistake on p262 where Gainsborough is knighted, but Waterfield has written a delicious satire. I have not read anything since CP Snow's The Masters which deals so well with the nasty tensions of trying to keep an intellect intact in public service. The novel can be read as an amusing comedy, or as an acidulous critique of the contrary, even destructive, forces at large in the museum world.