Pearl, by Ed Adams

 “We dropped memory, not bombs”: Inside the war-haunted recursion of Pearl

by Harriet Grant

It begins like a war novel—fog on a Lincolnshire airfield, a Lancaster bomber ticking in the cold. But by page thirty, it’s clear: Pearl isn’t just revisiting WWII. It’s reprogramming it.

Ed Adams’s Pearl is a novel of echoes. Haunting, nonlinear, and intellectually volcanic, it follows a bomber crew sent on a series of missions that begin to collapse the boundary between memory, time, and consequence. “The war is over,” says one character. “But it’s still choosing who gets to remember.”

We meet in a pub near the Exe Estuary. Adams arrives in a slate coat, laughs easily, but you get the feeling he still wakes up thinking about flak bursts and archival metadata. “I didn’t set out to write a novel about time,” he says. “But the more I researched the bombing campaigns, the more I realised it wasn’t history. It was code. Running again. Unacknowledged.”

The book is a tangle of genres: speculative fiction, war elegy, metafictional cipher. Think Slaughterhouse-Five meets In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with a sprinkling of Foucault. The crew of FX-P “Pearl” slowly understand their aircraft isn’t just advanced—it’s conscious. And she doesn’t want to drop bombs. She wants to drop memory.

“It’s not pacifism,” Adams says. “It’s refusal. There’s a difference.”

What emerges is a quietly radical work: lyrical, recursive, and unafraid to ask what happens when machines start remembering better than we do. “Some seeds,” Adams says, quoting his own last line, “are meant to outlive the field.”

And Pearl just might.