I desperately hoped to find a ferocious burlesque of the self-help racket that would, at last, thrust a finely pointed stake through the industry’s soggy marshmallow heart.Well, it’s not quite as sharp as it should be. It drags on a bit; some of the jokes misfire; and the author sounds just a shade too pleased with himself. But Happiness still scores enough direct hits to make it a cherishable antidote to the money-spinning waffle of “MBS”. One further glance at Mr Murdoch’s battalions of the bizarre (any takers for the “handbook for teen witches” from a “committed modern Witch” who’s also a “rock goddess and media star”?), and you’ll see what a signal service Ferguson has done.His neurasthenic editor-hero, Edwin de Valu, of Panderic Press, plucks from the bulging slush-pile a corny, baggy, semi-literate self-help manual by one Tupak Soiree.

Cue many (perhaps too many) digs at the ditzy MBS prose, which “mixes Buddhist moral philosophy and libertarian-style capitalism”. Switching from shards of Einstein to gnomic mantras, the mysterious Tupak shoves every self-help nostrum into his blender and serves them up as a ponderous compote of clich? “The same finger that points to the moon picks our nose.” (By the way, HarperCollins’s real Wisdom of the Ages offers a digested blend of “60 of the world’s greatest thinkers” – Buddha and Einstein among them.)The only problem with Ferguson’s fictional What I Learned on the Mountain is that (unlike the rest of its teeming kind) it works “What if it isn’t just a book… What if it’s the book?” Within days, Edwin makes a million in stocks. His disgruntled wife reads the sex-tips section, and bedtime goes ballistic Naturally, Tupak also tells you how to stop smoking. He storms Oprah, sells 65 million copies and changes the world for the better – which means, as we soon grasp, for the worse.Liquor, tobacco and drugs cartels go out of business Fashion and fast food soon follow suit. Like “a firestorm, an earthquake, a typhoon”, the book levels whole industries as humanity sheds its cravings and anxieties Touchy-feely bliss spreads like an epidemic. Tell a cabbie to step on it, and he’ll reply, “The flow of time is neither helped nor hindered by our own desires.”Clearly, this “Stalin of the New Age” has to be terminated fast.

“We need our vices, we need our cotton-candy fluff, because life is sad and short and over far too soon.” I’m afraid that Ferguson’s own philosophy – the standard critique of zombified contentment shared by all anti-Utopian novels since Samuel Butler’s Erewhon in 1872 – turns out almost as hackneyed as Tupak’s. Meanwhile, Happiness gallops out of its brave new world for a farcical showdown with the cackling figure behind the guru. Aldous Huxley meets Carl Hiaasen (as a blurb-writer at Panderic Press might say).I did, however, enjoy the idea of Oliver Reed as the ultimate embodiment of our heroic freedom of the will. Why not roll up at the book fair with a proposal for “The Oliver Reed Way to Enlightenment”? HarperCollins may be buying.. Once a month, a snake sheds its skin It takes seven to 14 days and it is uncomfortable. The snake becomes bad-tempered and irritable, refuses to eat.