I think Harding's Luck is a worse-constructed book than Amulet, but its prejudices are mostly about class, with no opportunity for the Assyriology etc.
I think you're right. My major structural issue with The Story of the Amulet is that it doesn't really gather a plot until it's three chapters from the end and it's such a good plot that there deserved to be more of it and less of the episodic condescension-prone history tourism. Harding's Luck has a plot and an apparent arc and I thought I could see where it was heading and then it ran into the main plot of The House of Arden and snapped in half—Nesbit wanted it to be something else all along and I don't actually think the two threads go together very well. And I agree with you about the pawnbroker. "If you don't beat all! . . . I give you a present, and you come to pledge it with me! You should have been one of our people!" Attempt at reparation appreciated, Nesbit, now please just back away.
[edit] Now I really want to re-read Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). That book has an exquisite balance of the numinous and the everyday and it works so well I don't even care about the implicit Christianity, because there is also wild magic and the realm of Fairy and Greek gods and the living signs of the Zodiac and a community coming back to life on both collective and personal levels. I read that book very young and it has only gotten better as I've returned to it. Nesbit's handling of the magical and the otherworldly reminds me of Goudge's, but her control over it is much more tenuous. I would really love to find a story of hers which sustained the strangeness. It doesn't feel like a technical problem; it's an authorial decision that I just disagree with.
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I think you're right. My major structural issue with The Story of the Amulet is that it doesn't really gather a plot until it's three chapters from the end and it's such a good plot that there deserved to be more of it and less of the episodic condescension-prone history tourism. Harding's Luck has a plot and an apparent arc and I thought I could see where it was heading and then it ran into the main plot of The House of Arden and snapped in half—Nesbit wanted it to be something else all along and I don't actually think the two threads go together very well. And I agree with you about the pawnbroker. "If you don't beat all! . . . I give you a present, and you come to pledge it with me! You should have been one of our people!" Attempt at reparation appreciated, Nesbit, now please just back away.
[edit] Now I really want to re-read Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). That book has an exquisite balance of the numinous and the everyday and it works so well I don't even care about the implicit Christianity, because there is also wild magic and the realm of Fairy and Greek gods and the living signs of the Zodiac and a community coming back to life on both collective and personal levels. I read that book very young and it has only gotten better as I've returned to it. Nesbit's handling of the magical and the otherworldly reminds me of Goudge's, but her control over it is much more tenuous. I would really love to find a story of hers which sustained the strangeness. It doesn't feel like a technical problem; it's an authorial decision that I just disagree with.