The Children of Pollution : THE WAR ZONE <i> by Alexander Stuart (Doubleday: $16.95; 210 pp.) </i>

A glorious summer morning. A father and his teen-age daughter and son paddle lazily on a river in Devon, one of England’s greenest and most bucolic counties. They are in that half-exhilarated, half-estranged state that comes of staying up all night. The mother is in the hospital, having given birth to a baby during a wild ride and a crash on dark back roads.

It could have been a disaster; it turned out well. They have been through an ordeal and they are celebrating. They have finished a bottle of wine, dispensation for a special occasion. The sun is hot. It is the most peaceful and innocent of scenes.

“A lie: The three of us together on the water, me and two people I’m tied to for life.”

Tom, the boy, is speaking. It is not a mere teen-ager’s disaffection. It is the start of a taut and terrible book, brilliantly written, about the corruption of a family and a society.

Alexander Stuart’s “The War Zone” does for Britain now something of what Anthony Burgess’ “The Clockwork Orange” did a quarter of a century ago. It is several steps further into the nightmare. Burgess’ book was a vision of the deadness and alienation of the welfare state; Stuart’s nightmare is about the unalloyed greed and indifference of Thatcherism. The emblematic shock in “Orange” was its gratuitous violence. In “War Zone,” it is incest.

Tom’s opening line sets the tone. His voice is the heart his story, as Holden Caulfield’s or Huck Finn’s are the hearts of theirs. Tom’s voice is bewildered, betrayed, striving for jauntiness, unbelieving of its own agony, and finally overwhelmed by it. He is the witness, and eventually the victim, of the brutal mutual seduction between his father and Jessie, a year or two older than he.

The image is sensational; some of the book’s scenes are explicit and shocking. Sex is hunger and anger, never pleasure. It is deformed; the deformity of an organism bred in polluted water.

In Stuart’s Britain, making money fast has eclipsed all notion of social responsibility, either to the present or to the future. Incest, of course, is the epitome of turning inward, of withholding seed, of contaminating the next generation.

Tom’s family is gifted and rich. The father is an architect who is building a hideous high-rise office building on the Thames in London. He makes his money by polluting; he doesn’t want to live with the results; he and his wife have fled the neglected and abused city for a country retreat.

Full of presentiment--he has not yet discovered what is happening but he feels the rottenness--Tom is an unwilling transplant. There was life in London, even in being chased by a black gang.

“I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone boxes, the heat from a burning car,” goes his angry, vulnerable voice. “London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well, the country doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. It doesn’t have a hope, it doesn’t know how to be healthy.”

England’s countryside is unreal, encroached upon. Its bucolic image is phony. The river they are paddling on that morning has garbage floating in it and is suspiciously warm.

“English water is never warm, not outside, not without help of some factory somewhere . . . not without a minor cock-up at the nearest reactor.”

The intimate and social symbolisms of “The War Zone,” fierce and jarring as they are, never seem arbitrary. They go quite naturally with Tom’s journey and the flavor of his voice; first a premonition, then a discovery, which he resists, then a full realization, and finally a helpless involvement in the consequences. He is the passenger who sees smoke on a wing engine, sees flames, gives the alarm and perishes in the crash.

There is an accidental view through a bathroom window of Jessie and their father bathing naked together. There is Tom’s hesitant confrontation with his sister, who is his closest friend. There is her dismissal of the incident as a casual indiscretion, and later her defiant avowal. Finally there is a terrible eye-witness scene.

Jessie is tough, incandescent, a leader. Before the book ends, she will become a monster--and so, less consciously, will Tom--but in these earlier stages, she is much an orphan as he is. An orphan, that is, of the have-it-all-now social denial of her father and his generation. For the father--the blandness with which Stuart depicts him is the most vivid of portraits--incest is the ultimate abdication of parenthood. For Jessie, in flames, it is a desperate clamor against such abdication.

The despair is evoked in a moving night scene on the beach where Tom and Jessie have gone with her friends in a local biker gang. Goaded by Tom’s insistent questions, Jessie turns on him:

“I told you, I want to go further than all the way. Nothing’s enough, you know that, we’ve had this conversation. Incest is brilliant. Dad didn’t want to--but he did. It’s a pull, it’s like the water there. One foot in and you’re not sure. A little more and it’s got you, it’s alive, you want it.”

And we hear the pain of an abandoned child as Tom sits there. “My sister hasn’t left me anything at all, she’s using it all up--life, sex, energy, despair.”

Tom tells his story with a biting immediacy, a continual tension and a poignancy that is only pointed up by his wit and his flashes of ironic insight. As the story is played out in a series of retributions, some of the control is lost. First Jessie, and finally Tom himself, are taken over by the corruption of which they are victims; we see her pain turning to cruelty, and his into a zombie-like surrender.

There is a certain unhinged melodrama in the later chapters. Tom’s voice goes dull, and the book loses some of its light. In part this may reflect the author’s failing control, but mainly it is the wreckage in this story of a society that has crashed.