I would like to say that this is philosophy meets mysticism, but it's only Aleister Crowley meets Carlos Castaneda. There are two central ideas throughout the book: that everything you do is what you must do, and that when you know something it is true. These two ideas are, well, not really explored, but rather repeated in different contexts and with different levels of disbelief. It is all quite simple really, which is not a bad thing on its own, but is phrased in a rather heavy-handed way, designed to impress and make it sound like profound concepts.

Bach manages to shed some of this heavy-handedness by presenting much of the book as a comedy, and dressing the ideas in witty banter and relaxed dialogue around camp-sites and cooking-fires. This way, a large part of the book works quite well – as an ironic examination of gullibility – but ultimately, by showing that in the world of the book, everything does work as advertised, he dismisses the irony and asks the reader to take the events at face value.

This discrepancy is maybe the strongest point of the book: you can read it as a philosophical treatise, a farce, or just a fun little novella. But of those three, two are not very good, and the third one might be a waste of your time.