An Insular Apocalypse : LONDON FIELDS <i> by Martin Amis (Harmony Books: $19.95; 470 pp.) </i>

Anticipating the end of the millennium, Martin Amis has written a novel of gaudy disintegration. “London Fields” is an English view of the end of the world: apocalyptic but insular, and with a whiff of snobbery to it.

It is an elaboration of T. S. Eliot’s whimper, though never excluding the possibility of a bang. Word of a genocidal Indochina war--one that makes the Khmer Rouge’s exploits seem like social work--buzzes in the background. From Washington, there is talk of “going in.” This, it turns out, refers to an operation on the President, a woman who is dying of cancer or something like it.

Cancer is a close image for the charnel-house smell of Amis’ London in the last year or so of the century. It is a place of feverish hyperactivity and mutant organisms.

To convey the demoralized, Clockwork Orange-like time, Amis writes in a style that is itself deliberately feverish and shattered, and that submerges sharp details in an uncertain haze. The book aims to be its own disintegration, and you could say that it succeeds, granting the verb its ambiguity. Reading it is like trying to assemble wildly scattered jigsaw pieces in the smog of an adjacent tannery.

It is hot and bright. Amis, like Salman Rushdie in “The Satanic Verses,” uses glittering weather, so unfamiliar to the London climate, to signal a world askew. The Thatcher gulf between rich and poor is set in concrete. Everyone lives for himself, and society is hardly even an abstraction.

Crime is up; shops and houses have been robbed so often that there is burglar-jam. Burglars have to line up, and while they’re waiting, other burglars burgle them. The familiar black London cab is used only by tourists; Londoners avoid them because the passengers are likely to get mugged in the traffic.

The chaos of disintegration is suggested more than it is spelled out. Realism, for Amis, is too orderly a way to convey what is happening. Point of view dissolves along with everything else.

Accordingly, he uses a dissolving narrator, Samson Young. He seems to be dying of some unnamed disease; at the end of the book, he will--more dissolution--kill himself. He has been living in New York, as a blocked author. Now he comes to London, exchanging his apartment with a British TV star, to make a last attempt at a book.

“London Fields” may be the book he writes. Or it may be a series of real events that he is writing down as he observes and participates in them. Or, most likely, it is a wavering alternation of the two. We are never sure. Ostensibly, there are three characters, two men and a woman, in the triangle around which the book is built. In fact, Samson keeps inserting himself into their lives and into the murder that occurs just before he kills himself.

The most vivid of the three characters is Keith, a small-time big-shot, a mostly nonviolent pursuer of various criminal lines, a “cheat,” as he likes to call himself. Nonviolence does not apply to women; he has a downtrodden wife and three other women whom he visits regularly. He is cock of a tiny walk: the dingy pub where he hangs out and pursues his one true religion--darts.

If Keith is a version of one English fictional type--an X-rated Andy Capp--Guy, whom Samson labels “The Foil,” is another. He is rich by inheritance, ineffectual, terribly nice and easily pushed around by his unpleasant American wife. He could be someone out of Evelyn Waugh; Samson, at one point, speculates about getting an actor from the films “A Handful of Dust” or “A Passage to India” to play him.

There is a certain tangible, and often amusing, realism to the portraits of Keith and Guy, but as we read, they swell and blur into a kind of hyper-reality. The swelling and blurring agent is Nicola, with whom both become obsessed. She is a 34-year-old femme fatale. She is also a waif, a hallucination, a shifting figure whose shape Samson keeps changing as he invents her, or tells about her--as I say, we are not sure which--and at one point, even makes love to her.

Nicola offers herself to Keith and Guy as the particular fantasy of each. To Keith she is a pornographic houri; in fact, she has him watch porno videos of herself before finally letting him have sex with her. With Guy, the upper-class nit, she goes through a lengthy charade of virginal inhibition before all but raping him.

Her real purpose--though real is hardly the right word--is to get murdered. She has second sight, and from the beginning, she knows how and when she will be killed. She even knows who will do it, although this is negotiable. It will depend, finally, upon Samson in his twin and indistinguishable roles as fictional inventor and character in his own fiction.

With its blend of realism and surreal hyper-reality, “London Fields” is a complicated and ambitious work. It also seems too much for Amis to handle. His sardonic wit, his keen eye for modern English life and his anger at where this life is leading, all surface frequently and to good effect. Keith and Guy stand out sharply, comically and memorably, at times. At other times they disappear in a dreamlike blur.

Amis loses his, and our, way for too much of the time. His formless Nicola, Samson’s alter-ego, muse and temptress, the narrator, becomes a foggy bore. So does Samson himself. The picture of the dissolving modern worlds--English variety--is obscured, not enhanced by the narrator’s own dissolving voice.

It is the author’s voice, of course. Ultimately, it is a voice talking to itself through a superexpensive sound system and losing its way among the reverberations.