With evangelical ardor, he sets his sixth novel, ''London Fields ,'' in the grimmest of times. The approach of a global catastrophe he simply calls ''the Crisis'' provides the background for a bitter tragicomedy of life in a world going noisily to hell. And ''Einstein's Monsters,'' a recent collection of short stories, brought forth exactly what its title predicted. A total eclipse is predicted, and the sun now lies like a misplaced ball of fire on the horizon. Nuclear bombs stockpiled for a trip to oblivion may be dropped on the day of the eclipse.
Animals seem to be vanishing.
Fortunately, this is no tale of generals barking menacing orders. The people in ''London Fields '' tend, by and large, to do exactly what they would probably always have done, crisis or no crisis. And this is where the book saves itself from the burden of its symbolism, setting a small-scale story of personal destruction against the backdrop of the larger doom. ''London Fields '' is a virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society. In an age of attenuated fiction, this is a large book of comic and satirical invention. As he did in ''Money,'' Mr. Amis again employs the device of the intrusive and all-knowing author within the story.