The Hound in the Left-hand Corner: A Novel - Softcover

Waterfield, Giles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743475534 ISBN 13: 9780743475532

Verlag: Atria, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In this brilliantly witty satire -- a bestseller in the UK -- a prestigious British museum launches an ambitious new exhibit...which quickly becomes a seasonal nightmare.
Think that a day in the life of a London museum director is cold, quiet, and austere? Think again. Giles Waterfield brings a combination of intellectual comedy and knockabout farce to the subject in this story of one long day in a museum full of scandals, screw-upsŠand more than a few scalawags.
At the beginning of The Hound in the Left-hand Corner, Auberon, the brilliant but troubled director of the Museum of British History, is preparing one midsummer's day for the opening of the most spectacular exhibition his museum has ever staged. The centerpiece is a painting of the intriguing Lady St. John strikingly attired as Puck, which hasn't been shown in London in a hundred years. As the day passes, the portrait arouses disquieting questions, jealousies, rivalries -- and more than a few strange affections -- in the minds of the museum staff. As guests and employees pour in, the tension rises -- and Auberon himself has the hilariously ridiculous task of keeping the peace, without losing his own sense of reality as well.
For everyone who loves the farce of David Lodge and Michael Frayn, or even the Antiques Roadshow, the fast-paced, hilarious satire of The Hound in the Left-hand Corner is sure to delight and entertain.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Giles Waterfield has worked at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and as director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. He now writes, teaches, and curates exhibitions. His first novel, The Long Afternoon, published in England, won the McKitterick Prize in 2001.

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Chapter One

The Museum, 3 AM.

At 0300 hours the guard on patrol duty on the first floor is due to walk through Exhibition Suite One. In his central control room in the basement, with its cameras watching every public gallery, the staff corridors and meeting rooms and potential entry points (though not quite yet the offices), the exits, the delivery yard, the stores, the four streets around the building, John Winterbotham, Head of Security, can survey everything always. Now he turns to the camera covering Exhibition Suite One. He trusts his men, more or less, but Ralph, who is patrolling the ground floor at this moment, is a new boy. At 0300 hours precisely, the door to the first room opens and Ralph, small, neat, and dark, appears. He looks conscientious but nervous, as though an assailant might emerge from behind a showcase. He knows he's under surveillance. He looks around the whole room in the approved manner and presses the security button, which records his timekeeping. John Winterbotham is reasonably satisfied, though it's a pity none of his young recruits has his own military background.

On the morning of Midsummer's Day of 2001, BRIT is asleep. It was called the Museum of English History until last year, but with the millennium it was felt that a livelier name was needed and that "English" had exclusive connotations, so "BRIT" (subtitled "The Museum of British History") came in instead. At least, it seems asleep from outside: no passerby could sense the dim security lights glowing in all the rooms, or the sound of solitary steps along the marble and parquet floors. Anyone glancing at the portico, with its ten enormous columns and monumental staircase, might think it the temple of an abandoned cult. Only a set of cords above the front door, waving in the night breeze, suggests it's ever inhabited.

Anyone who could enter the closed double bronze doors with their reliefs of Britannia and Saint George would reach a completely still entrance hall. It is a vast domed room, with screens of columns on four sides and a stone coat of arms above each screen. Opposite the entrance a gigantic staircase leads to the upper floor. Each corner of the room is occupied by a massive statue: Art, Industry, Learning, and Valour. During the day this is the busiest part of the building, constantly filling and emptying, babbling with a thousand tongues and a dozen languages, with inquiries for the lavatories and the cafeteria and Michelangelo's David and the Magna Carta, with hordes of near-rioting French schoolchildren and attentive Japanese. At night, empty and lit by pale security lights, its cavernous heights offer no welcome.

The room has perplexed generations of museum directors and designers. "So imperialistic," they said after the Second World War, "so huge, how can we persuade ordinary people it's a place for them?" "How can we make it look swinging?" they had cried in the sixties as they tried to disguise the dimensions under false white ceilings and walls. At the beginning of the new century, the management team agonizes over its authoritarianism and social élitism.

At the back of the building, Ralph walks slowly into the first exhibition room, apparently surprised at its transformation since the previous night. Though not quite finished, the exhibition, which is to open later that day, is almost in place. It's the museum's major event of the year, indeed its biggest exhibition ever, and has kept the place in turmoil for weeks. Elegance, it's called, The Eighteenth Century Revisited. What a to-do, thinks Winterbotham. The installation staff were working there until an hour ago under the supervision of Diana, highly professional woman that she is, and left in an unruly bunch, shouting and giggling as though they'd been drinking -- though he kept a close eye on them and spotted no irregularities. The big problem was the arrival of a huge painting by Gainsborough or somebody like that, it's all over the posters and stuff, came in at 10 P.M. in an unmarked van with a police escort, God, what a business, a Mr. Marten and a Mr. Smiles in attendance with their own crew of technicians, wouldn't let anyone from the museum near it, took it into the exhibition and hung it themselves. They seem to have had a bit of aggro with that German bloke, head of Conservation, who wanted to inspect it, wouldn't let him near the thing. He was furious, said it was his duty, but they wouldn't listen to him. Apparently it's worth an amazing amount of money, star of the show. Belongs to the Chairman of the Trustees, apparently it's the absolute prize of his collection; good man, Sir Lewis, knows how to handle authority, unlike some who are always asking your opinion when it's their job to lead....

Young Ralph seems tempted to linger. He must be spoken to. A good guard concentrates on the job at hand. That job's about security, not looking at objects. The only reason to look at any specimen on display is to check that it's in place and undamaged. After a pause or two, Ralph walks through the room at the correct speed and reaches the second exhibition room at 0302, the scheduled time. John glances at the camera covering the ground floor front. His man there is Norman, long-established, no problem, an ex-Welsh Guardsman like John himself.

Ralph is currently patrolling the Gallery of Early English History: from the Stone Age to the Norman Conquest. It was the first gallery created when the museum was founded. A shaky government was persuaded that the museum would kindle patriotic fervor by celebrating England's political liberty, maritime endeavor, industry and science, literature and the arts, agriculture, trade, warfare. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it is one of the largest and most popular museums in the country, visited by over two million each year.

There's a great deal to see. Even the building, long derided as pompous, is now admired. On the South Bank of the river behind Lambeth Palace and Waterloo Station, it was paid for in 1902 by an ambitious purveyor of wine and spirits. He hoped the building might turn him an earl but, not being a gentleman, had to be satisfied with a viscountcy. Viscount Haringey wanted a proper building like the Natural History Museum, but up-to-date. He commissioned, from the architects Lanchester and Rickards, a palace in the quintessentially English Wrenaissance style. Built in red brick and Portland stone, its twenty-five-bay facade boasts a tower at each end, adorned with balconies at three levels, and unexpected finials on the hipped roof. The huge coat of arms of England over the main entrance has been a favorite target for paint-throwing political protesters ever since the museum opened.

The Gallery of Early English History is long. Having walked its eighty yards at a steadily increasing speed and glanced at some of its four thousand exhibits, visitors imagine they've seen the whole museum. They don't realize that beyond its marble doorcase, over three floors, stretch the Gallery of Medieval History, the Gallery of Early Modern History, the Tudor and Stuart galleries (sponsored by a firm of interior decorators), the Georgian and Regency galleries, two Victorian galleries, the Gallery of the Industrial Revolution (sponsored by a Japanese car production company), the Gallery of English Painting and Sculpture (supported by a major American trust), the London Gallery, the Gallery of Empire, the Gallery of World War (no sponsorship available here), the Gallery of Women's History, the Gallery of Technology and Science, the Discovery Room, and a number more, quite a number. The attendants are used to comforting visitors who, turning the corner and gaining their first view of the apparently eternal Gallery of Medieval History, turn pale, grip their bags convulsively, plead for escape. But there is none. "Museum...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743475534
• ISBN 13: 9780743475532
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland