BOOK REVIEW : Socialist Experiment in L.A. : BREAD & HYACINTHS: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles, <i> by Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe</i> , California Classics $9.95; 144 pages

One of the odd pleasures of the California desert is the chance discovery of a ruin that harks back to some mysterious habitation of the distant past.

“Four spectral pillars of native stone” in the high desert of the Antelope Valley are what prompted Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe to dig into California history and uncover the secrets of “a modern Stonehenge.”

What they had discovered were the remains of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony: “One of the few remaining physical symbols of the socialist dream in Los Angeles and the creation of Job Harriman,” they explain in “Bread & Hyacinths.” Harriman, not the Llano colony, is the real subject of the book.

Born in 1861, Harriman was a farmer’s son from Indiana, an ordained minister, an early incarnation of what we would call a “cause” lawyer and a firebrand in the radical political circles of turn-of-the-century San Francisco.

After he moved to Los Angeles for reasons of health, Harriman very nearly won the mayoralty of Los Angeles as a candidate of the socialist movement.

The authors of “Bread & Hyacinths” clearly regard Job Harriman as an intensely romantic figure, a red-hot symbol of militant labor, and they dress him up in the rhetorical garb of hero and saint.

“The tall, slender, smooth-faced young man cut a dashing figure with his dazzling smile and ready wit,” they enthuse. “He combined the appearance and the delivery of a Shakespearean actor with the oratorical intensity of an evangelical preacher.”

This slender but potent book draws us into an early and unfamiliar era of Southern California, when Los Angeles seemed more like Charcoal Alley than Lotusland.

According to the authors, the town was “a hotbed of labor strife and the fiefdom of an economic and political machine of Machiavellian purpose and immense, if partly concealed, proportions.”

These thundering phrases--so typical of the collective prose style of the triumvirate of authors--indirectly refer to the bogyman of “Bread & Hyacinths,” Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, presented as a villainous foil to saintly Job Harriman.

Otis, of course, was an early owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times and a commanding (if enduringly controversial) figure in the boom years of Southern California. The authors recycle some of the more colorful Otis lore--and a good deal of inflammatory speculation that still attaches itself to him--in an effort to create a historical set piece.

“Otis suffered from a siege mentality,” they write. “At the height of labor strife in Los Angeles, he drove through the streets with a cannon mounted on the hood of his automobile. Fifty rifles were kept at the ready in a tower room; near the managing editor’s desk was a case of loaded shotguns.”

Characterized in “Bread & Hyacinths” as the climax of “the most apocalyptical battle between labor and capital that may have ever been,” the bombing of the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 1, 1910, is presented as a fateful confrontation between Otis and Harriman: “In the lives of both Otis and Harriman,” the authors write in a kind of drum roll, “everything seemed to be converging in 1910.”

Harriman was among the lawyers who defended the McNamara brothers, a pair of labor activists accused of planting the bomb in “Ink Alley” at The Times. But, according to the authors, the real significance of the bombing was its impact on Harriman’s 1911 campaign for mayor as a candidate of the Union Labor Party.

Harriman, they suggest, was headed toward an electoral victory. But an 11th-hour guilty plea by the McNamara brothers--brokered, as the authors report, by Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens and Otis--was intended to sabotage the Harriman campaign. It did.

“That was the price,” the authors write of the plea bargain. “No Job Harriman.”

After devoting so much energy and enthusiasm to The Times bombing and the Otis-Harriman battle, the authors present the saga of the desert colony of Llano del Rio almost as an afterthought.

The three-year history of the settlement is recounted in a few brisk chapters, and--surprisingly--the authors do not make much of a profound irony in its ultimate failure: Los Angeles thrived because Otis and his fellow boosters succeeded in securing water rights in the distant Owens Valley, and Llano failed because local ranchers defeated the colony’s claim to water from a nearby river.

“Bread & Hyacinths” is so overwrought, so reminiscent of the heroic literature of the Old Left, that it sometimes begins to parody itself. Still, it’s a fine example of what regional publishing can and ought to be: vigorous, knowing, committed and unafraid, even if a bit eccentric.