Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston review – a spoof too far

Britain has a rich tradition of literary diarists, from Samuel Pepys and James Boswell to Frances Partridge and Alan Bennett. We also have a rich tradition of spoof diarists, who seem realer than real to many readers: Charles Pooter, Bridget Jones, Adrian Mole.

Brian Bilston falls somewhere between the two. Like Mole, he’s a poet, only a real-life published poet with a large social media following. But Brian Bilston is a pseudonym, the creation of a man named Paul Millicheap, who has now written a fictional diary. While the “real” Bilston is known as “the poet laureate of Twitter” for his minimalist musings on Jeremy Clarkson and Ocado deliveries, fictional Brian is struggling to attract more than 43 tweeple to retweet his daft doggerel. “Beat poets” is one specimen: “Some say it’s for their own good/but I don’t think you should.” There’s another one called Monetization: “The ad said/MONETIZE YOUR FOLLOWERS/so he thought/he would respond;/he painted them/in the changing light,/like waterlilies/in a pond.”

In Diary of a Somebody, Brian is a 45-year-old divorcee leading a “quiet half-life”, aside from the occasional argument with his ex-wife Sophie about forgetting their son’s parents’ evening. He spends his evenings reordering his book collection by ISBN code while scarfing custard creams. Imagine Wendy Cope crossed with Mark from Peep Show with a few extra quirks by way of characterisation: Mr Men slippers, a tattoo of Enya, a penchant for 1990s middlebrow detective shows. He works at a “solutions” firm, but is “multi-slacking” his way to “jobsolescence”.

When Brian is “decruited” from his job, he decides to write a poem a day. Most are in a genre we might term centrist drab, concerning unused gym membership, Spotify playlists and custard creams. But there are also haiku horoscopes, Venn diagram verse and pastiches of REM, Kate Bush and Emily Dickinson (all listed, slightly pedantically, at the back of the book). Meanwhile, in his monthly poetry circle, Brian falls for fellow rhymester Liz – “at least 60 per cent of Shakespeare’s sonnets could have been written about her” – and inspires the derision of Toby Salt, a Radio 4 darling who gives lectures on didacticism in 1950s Hungarian verse. When Salt goes missing, Brian becomes the prime suspect, and the novel switches from bumbling romantic comedy into crime caper.

Comedy lies in the disconnect between how a character sees themselves and how others see them. Brian feels a “creeping despair” that Liz “might only like me for my poetry”. But he is not nearly as endearing as the author seems to think, and the world he inhabits never feels real or consequential in the way that Adrian Mole’s cul-de-sac did. Considering the publishers’ intemperate hyperbole (“the most original novel you will read this or any year”) it’s hard not to be disappointed. There are a few clever parody poems such as “Not Drowning but Waving”, which inverts Stevie Smith’s melancholic classic: “I was simply splashing around, having fun,/And not drowning but waving”. But there are too many (“Do not go, lentil, into that good pie”, “Everybody Yurts”) that rely on predictable punning. Others are so twee, they make Pam Ayres look like Charles Bukowski. “For my love for you shall never crumble/My beloved creamy custard biscuit”. There are 384 pages of this and Bilston’s writing doesn’t have the bite nor well-sprung wit to cut through the sheer depressing Britishness of it all. It made me long for some 1950s Hungarian didacticism, or anything, really, to escape the quirky drabness.