A Tram Through Time, A Yacht Named Displacement

A Tram Through Time, A Yacht Named Displacement

Review by Amira Quinn | Culture

You don’t so much read Ed Adams' Residuals as step inside it—and then realise, halfway through a slow descent into Sóller’s sun-pinned citrus groves, that you’re not entirely sure which layer of the narrative you’re on. That’s not a bug. That’s the operating principle.

In Descent, the novel’s pivotal midsection, we follow Josh—an expelled analyst, maybe, or a failed prophet—as he’s led by a woman named Elsa through the scalding heat of Mallorca. She says little. She doesn’t need to. Every detail around her has the taut, coded logic of intelligence work or ritual.

A tram is waiting. A man in a jacket—impossibly tailored, “too elegant for weather”—is already seated. Readers of Tyrant will recognise the jacket before they recognise the man. It’s Zane Parallax, from Tyrant. Of course it is.

What follows isn’t confrontation, or exposition. It’s a choreography of spatial power. The ride is quiet. The citrus groves close in like a perfumed trap. The view opens—“a blue that made the land beside it look unreal.”The yacht appears like a non-answer.

Dialogue, in Residuals, is both loaded and resistant to explanation. Zane speaks like a man who’s already made the deal. Elsa doesn’t translate. Josh complies, mostly by blinking.

And that’s what’s so compelling. Residuals is less interested in giving you a map than it is in seducing you with the feeling that you had one, once, but lost it somewhere between the scent of sun-warmed orange oil and the moment you realised the man at the back of the tram has always been watching.

The tech is ghosted. The politics are submerged. The style? Think Le Carré if he’d been line-edited by Joan Didion after watching Tenet on codeine.

What’s clear by the end of this chapter is that the world of Residuals is governed by presence, atmosphere, and the physics of memory. The yacht isn’t an escape. It’s a threshold. And no one’s explaining what it means to cross it.

Good. We don’t want meaning. We want recursion.

And Residuals delivers it—sleek, sun-dazzled, and quietly unsettling.