Review -- Past Continuous by Tony Bayliss

Past Continuous was inspired by the suicide of the author's [Tony Bayliss'] son. That's the first sentence on the back cover of the book. But the summary ends with references to top secret research and robotics. So how do I categorize Past Continuous? Part semi-true story and part science fiction tale? Does it work as something of a confessional, and of course more relevant to my interests, does it work as a science fiction novel? Read on to find out my thoughts about Past Continuous, published by Sparkling Books.


I've never been so torn about writing a review before. This book gave me a lot to think about, but not in a good way. It made think about what it means to be a reviewer, what kinds of standards you hold yourself to, and things along those lines. Do you force yourself to finish a book, to truly slog through it, before you write a review? If you really could not finish the book, is that somehow doing the author a disservice--even if you disclose that fact in your write up (not a review)?


Past Continuous made me think about all these things because I almost didn't finish it. I came close to giving up multiple times.


But let's start at the beginning. Matthew Scott is a gifted, intelligent, but troubled young man who doesn't get along with his parents. He's awkward with girls, always thinking about sex, but yearning for a true love with whom to share his body, mind, and soul. Matthew also works for a top secret government project about robotics and other such near-future tech. The Matthew commits suicide. However this doesn't come as a shock. Imagine if you had the main character kill themselves in a way that wasn't foreshadowed... 


Anyway, Matthew's suicide doesn't surprise the reader because it's the first thing mentioned on the back cover. I knew it was coming, and I actually wanted to get to that part because, again according to the back cover, after his suicide is where the story really starts. It took almost 70 pages of Matthew complaining about how awful his life was because he didn't have the proper woman to love before he took his life. Twenty-one chapters worth of material. I almost couldn't take it.


And that's one of the major problems with the novel. Because of the semi-biographical nature of the story, it feels way too much like a confessional rather than an entertaining fiction story. You can definitely tell that this is a father trying to write a fictional character that happens to be based on his deceased son. While I'm not trying to be callous, it just doesn't make for good reading. It feels too much like a father writing about how Matthew would be from the father's perspective rather than an author writing about a character from that character's perspective. To me it all boils down to the fact that Matthew wasn't a very interesting character.


But there's robots in this story right? The back said there'd be robots. There are, but they don't show up until the very, very end of the novel. At least 200 pages in and countless chapters in. If anything one of the biggest problems with this novel is pacing (along with characterization and editing). There are over sixty chapters in this book, and in some books that makes it feel like the reading is going by quickly. However in Past Continuous it slows everything down. I'd read chapter after chapter, some of them maybe a page long without feeling like I was getting anywhere.


It doesn't help that the majority of the novel is dialogue. For being a science fiction novel about robots and conspiracies, there is very little action here. And I'm not just talking about the explosions and guns type action. The characters rarely do anything but talk about other characters not in the scene. The majority of the novel is made up of characters "telling" me things rather than characters "doing" or "showing" me things. Now having a lot of dialogue isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when it's poorly edited dialogue, then yes it is a bad thing. Many pages of the novel consisted of walls and walls of dialogue, back and forth conversations with absolutely no action or even dialogue tags in between. On page 78 for example, one paragraph of dialogue takes up well over 50% of the page. That is ridiculous. It makes Past Continuous feel amateurish.


But again it's not just the form of the dialogue that's the problem. It's also the content. Because of the personal nature of this story, there were parts where I definitely could tell where the author's personal voice and politics were creeping into the book. They didn't flow naturally, and they really took me out of the story. See page: 53 for a weird speech about "high ideals" and "shaking off the constraints of Victorian values and the iron grip that religion had on our daily lives" or 219-220 for a rant against the USA's foreign policy during the George W. Bush presidency and the US's supposed influence on NATO.


I don't mind politics in my novels, but I'd rather have the action in the novel "show" me something illuminating about our times. I don't need a character acting as the author's mouthpiece, especially when the author uses multiple characters as mouthpieces.


And do you know what the worst part about all of this is? The concepts in this book aren't bad! By the time I got to the part about robots I thought to myself, "Yes! There is definitely a story about these kinds of technology." There's a gold mine there, but I feel like Bayliss failed to actually mine it. He barely scratched the surface of the sci-fi aspects. There was even a twist at the very end that would have been far more interesting if it hadn't been so underutilized.


I'm not trying to be cruel. I can't imagine the pain of losing a loved one due to suicide. No parent should ever have to outlive their child. But the simple fact is Past Continuous doesn't work as a novel. There were good ideas near the end, but they were buried far too deeply and so woefully unexplored that they didn't make the rest of the book worth the trouble.