The Bomb by Frank Harris is a novelized account of the Haymarket Riot and bombing in Chicago during the 1880s. Narrated by Rudolph Schnaubelt, a real suspect in the actual event, we get a point by point account of his life and what led up to the bombing that kills 60 police officers or so. It is definitely a book with strengths and weaknesses.
Schnaubelt emigrates from his native Germany to New York City where he goes through the trials of doing brutal construction work at low rates of pay. His life gets better when he starts writing articles for a German socialist newspaper. He is not happy with his life so he moves on to Chicago and continues building his career as a journalist. It is there that Schnaubelt meets Elsie, a young, pretty woman who he pursues throughout most of the story. Elsie, however, hates political radicalism and often defends the capitalist system even though she and her mother live in poverty. Their relationship is melodramatic. There are long conversations between the two where they can not decide whether they want to be together or not. They do a lot of kissing, caressing, and embracing. That much of it is tedious and it started to seem possible that Schnaubelt's desire to bomb a police squadron was partially a result of sexual frustration. That would be symbolic, though, and Harris did not seem to be interested in using symbolism in this particular novel.
Rudolph Schnaubelt, as a journalist, begins attending socialist and labor union meetings and eventually ends up at an anarchist club where he befriends Louis Lingg, another German immigrant and labor leader with a dream to see fair rates of pay, an end to child labor, and an eight hour work day. In Lingg's apartment, the narrator finds books about chemistry and soon it is revealed that his friend is planning on making bombs to fight the police. Lingg is described as a magnanimous man, larger than life in his care for the working poor and the oppressed immigrant population (At that time, white European immigrants were feared, hated and scapegoated the way Latino immigrants are now which makes you wonder how the ancestors of immigrants could be just as bad as the people who treated their forefathers like dirt. Those who do not learn the lessons of history...). But Schnaubelt's praise for Lingg does not match up directly with the man as he is depicted; his thoughts and speeches are vague and weak and his presence in the novel is diminutive in comparison to Schnaubelt's first person subjective narration. Another of the novel's flaws is that Harris could not portray Lingg with the strength that he actually thought that character had.
Frank Harris's sentences are wooden and he writes with a limited vocabulary range but his prose is not nearly as terrible as Ayn Rand's. There are times when this works to his advantage though; this writing style does not help the way the relationships are described but it does work well when describing the lives of immigrant laborers who lived stark, bleak lives. And the descriptions of the riots and police brutality involved really are vivid and frightening.
Despite all these flaws, there is one thing that Harris got right in The Bomb and that is the narrator, Rudolph Schnaubelt, himself. While the prose may not always be dynamic, the inner life of the narrator is. From his subjective viewpoint we see him transform through out life from a naive immigrant, to a disillusioned journalist, to a frustrated lover and on to the point where, after seeing a teenage girl get shot by police at a labor union rally, he becomes an anarchist bomb-thrower and fugitive from justice. His moral conflicts about the terrorist act are well-developed and makes him succeed as the main character where other people in the story come off as two-dimensional and sentimental.
It is interesting that The Bomb is still being read more than one hundred years after its publication considering it is not a masterpiece of a novel and Frank Harris is, at best, a minor literary figure. It is probably the enduring interest in the labor unrest and union movements of the late 19th century that are keeping it alive. Or maybe it is the novel's raw humanity itself; after all, your ordinary person tends to be sentimental and melodramatic and very few people actually are good story-tellers. The narrative is accessible and the moral ambiguity is something that many people can relate to. Maybe, for these reasons, this novel succeeds, in some ways, accidentally.
Schnaubelt emigrates from his native Germany to New York City where he goes through the trials of doing brutal construction work at low rates of pay. His life gets better when he starts writing articles for a German socialist newspaper. He is not happy with his life so he moves on to Chicago and continues building his career as a journalist. It is there that Schnaubelt meets Elsie, a young, pretty woman who he pursues throughout most of the story. Elsie, however, hates political radicalism and often defends the capitalist system even though she and her mother live in poverty. Their relationship is melodramatic. There are long conversations between the two where they can not decide whether they want to be together or not. They do a lot of kissing, caressing, and embracing. That much of it is tedious and it started to seem possible that Schnaubelt's desire to bomb a police squadron was partially a result of sexual frustration. That would be symbolic, though, and Harris did not seem to be interested in using symbolism in this particular novel.
Rudolph Schnaubelt, as a journalist, begins attending socialist and labor union meetings and eventually ends up at an anarchist club where he befriends Louis Lingg, another German immigrant and labor leader with a dream to see fair rates of pay, an end to child labor, and an eight hour work day. In Lingg's apartment, the narrator finds books about chemistry and soon it is revealed that his friend is planning on making bombs to fight the police. Lingg is described as a magnanimous man, larger than life in his care for the working poor and the oppressed immigrant population (At that time, white European immigrants were feared, hated and scapegoated the way Latino immigrants are now which makes you wonder how the ancestors of immigrants could be just as bad as the people who treated their forefathers like dirt. Those who do not learn the lessons of history...). But Schnaubelt's praise for Lingg does not match up directly with the man as he is depicted; his thoughts and speeches are vague and weak and his presence in the novel is diminutive in comparison to Schnaubelt's first person subjective narration. Another of the novel's flaws is that Harris could not portray Lingg with the strength that he actually thought that character had.
Frank Harris's sentences are wooden and he writes with a limited vocabulary range but his prose is not nearly as terrible as Ayn Rand's. There are times when this works to his advantage though; this writing style does not help the way the relationships are described but it does work well when describing the lives of immigrant laborers who lived stark, bleak lives. And the descriptions of the riots and police brutality involved really are vivid and frightening.
Despite all these flaws, there is one thing that Harris got right in The Bomb and that is the narrator, Rudolph Schnaubelt, himself. While the prose may not always be dynamic, the inner life of the narrator is. From his subjective viewpoint we see him transform through out life from a naive immigrant, to a disillusioned journalist, to a frustrated lover and on to the point where, after seeing a teenage girl get shot by police at a labor union rally, he becomes an anarchist bomb-thrower and fugitive from justice. His moral conflicts about the terrorist act are well-developed and makes him succeed as the main character where other people in the story come off as two-dimensional and sentimental.
It is interesting that The Bomb is still being read more than one hundred years after its publication considering it is not a masterpiece of a novel and Frank Harris is, at best, a minor literary figure. It is probably the enduring interest in the labor unrest and union movements of the late 19th century that are keeping it alive. Or maybe it is the novel's raw humanity itself; after all, your ordinary person tends to be sentimental and melodramatic and very few people actually are good story-tellers. The narrative is accessible and the moral ambiguity is something that many people can relate to. Maybe, for these reasons, this novel succeeds, in some ways, accidentally.
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