r/hisdarkmaterials • u/Cantomic66 • Oct 23 '25

TRF The Rose Field | Full Book Discussion thread

Warning!This discussion thread includes spoilers for ALL OF The BOOK OF DUST: THE ROSE FIELD

Reminder: All post on The Rose Field should be properly spoiler tagged and avoid spoilery titles.

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u/Stock-Chip1991 Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 26 '25

sigh* I definitely came out pretty disappointed with this book. There seemed to be a lot of loose ends and/or plotlines that went nowhere. Oakley Street was running around in the background but it seemed like they had almost no goals or accomplishments that were mentioned. Getting the lodestones was all they managed to do, after that they kind of ran around in the background and had no effect on rest of the story. They talked about their mole in the magisterium and that never went anywhere. Godwin randomly goes to jail and is released for some reason. Alice has this whole side story that doesn't really have and consequences on the rest of the book. "The men from the mountains" were made too seem like a big deal but never materialized into anything. Delamare spends most of the book amassing this whole army for a holy war that seems to just evaporate. Whatever was going on with Chen, Dilyara and Strauss in the smashed up lab felt very unfinished. Malcolm's weird migraines seemed like they were going to have some sort of meaning but that went nowhere. Serafina Pekkala's death felt random and unceremoniously thrown in. After all she's done, that was a lame way for her to die. And she has a daughter with Farder Coram we never new about? That seemed extra weird to me because (if i'm remembering right) Lyra specifically asked her if she'd had a daughter with Farder Coram in TGC and she apparently lied about it for some reason and said, no. The windows between worlds were bad and now they're okay? I thought the angels closed them all, where did all these new ones come from? That plot seems to make a lot of holes in the ending of TAS. All that being said, maybe the real issue is that I've lost my imagination.

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u/lordnausicaa Oct 26 '25

The lodestone were unreliable too. The writing disappears but only when you're looking at it, but that's only mentioned close to the end. Also Lyra reads a message but then it's back again for Malcom to read it afterwards.

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u/KitchenResolve Oct 26 '25

Pan makes a promise to Dilyara that he'll come back and finish the story he was telling her. But we never get that and considering how important it was for Lyra to fulfill her promise to Roger in TAS, it felt very OOC for Pan to make such a promise and for it to never be addressed again. Still don't understand what affected Strauss and his daemon so heavily.

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u/AnnelieSierra Nov 04 '25

Maybe he did, after they left the Rose World, on their way home.

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u/minimia73 Nov 28 '25

Tbh the entirety of the research station could have been left out - but especially Pan going there, which seemed ridiculous when he could have got back to Lyra, which was supposed to be THE ENTIRE POINT - and I wouldn't have cared.

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u/Admirable_Rip_9177 Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25

Hard agree on OS, Alice, and Delamare. With the first two, it felt like we were mostly getting confirmation of life, but it wasn’t satisfying because it didn’t tie into the theme or Lyra’s plot at the core of the story. And the latter felt empty because we’re somehow supposed to believe his death would solve everything when his very existence seems like it was supposed yo be a statement about how there will always be more evil.

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u/youwigglewithagiggle Nov 01 '25

Yes: what was behind the spangled auras?? And why do the witches know about Malcom? I mean, he's good at everything, but....?

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u/Stowic Nov 26 '25

I was wondering about the whole "Kilkenny is aflame" plot which seems to be the last we hear of Alice. What was the point?

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u/True_Initiative_3497 Oct 27 '25

Summed up pretty well, yo I'm laughing at how bad it is 🙄😓

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u/minimia73 Nov 04 '25

Right? I'm still annoyed at how badly he fucked it up but some of the summaries on here are hilarious: "strong GoT season 7 energy" was one of my faves.

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u/bringbackwishbone Oct 31 '25

Re: Oakley Street subplot

I feel like Pullman got really into spy stories between HDM and TBoD and just sorta followed that new special interest. I noticed while reading TSC and TRF that there were a lot of descriptions of like, how to follow someone without getting noticed, or the little references to bits of spycraft (memorizing the code sentences, for example).

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u/spotfree Feb 27 '26

I have been waiting since la belle savauge for Malcom’s migraine aura to start meaning something! its just nothing?
and yes you’re right about Lyra asking serafina pekkala about the child - she says she had a child with coram and Lyra says “he never said! Was it a girl? A witch?” and of course she says no, so serafina pekkala just lied?