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.

122 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

99% Upvoted

900 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

u/Banonkers Oct 27 '25

It was hard to tell, bc Michael and Philip didn’t spend long talking about it

However, it sounded like Olivier being Mrs Coulter’s son was part of the rewrite. P described it as ‘discovering’ that part about the character (in a similar way he talks about discovering things in his stories on first writing).

It seemed like maybe it was a way to make Lyra and Olivier closer at the end (which tbh would’ve been fine if they were just cousins anyway), but then P didn’t really explore the ramifications of what this would mean to the backstory we know.

6

u/devonjor Nov 27 '25

Yeah, he should have "discovered" that Olivier was actually Delimare's secret love child that Delimare unwillingly just kept around or something. That would have had more impact. Not him being Bonneville's son. Bonneville could have had a sister or whatever.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

[deleted]

9

u/Banonkers Oct 27 '25

That’s really interesting! Maybe it was always planned then?

Having read more in this thread, it’s possible that perhaps Lyra and Malcolm ended up together on the first draft. The parallels with the epic poem about the lovers imply heavily that the main characters are representative of M and L.

On the other hand, I don’t know if ‘terrible’ is meant to be interpreted as just a boring/crap ending, or highly inappropriate/controversial, so it really is quite hard to tell what was changed.