Its protagonist, Babylen Tatarsky, graduate student and poet, has been tossed onto the streets after the fall of the Soviet Union where he soon learns his true calling: developing Russian versions of western advertisements.

His quest is further aided by another form of spirits: through a ouija board, Che Guevara writes a treatise on identity, consumerism, and television.

The firm's chief duty is to make sure that Ishtar's enemy, the dog Phukkup, does not awaken, bringing with it chaos and destruction.

The idea beneath the motif of Mesopotamian Mythology seem to serve the purpose of deification of advertising as in the end the most powerful media corporation appears to be a Chaldean Guild sustaining (preserving) the balance between good and evil by means of deft informational manipulations.

Tatarsky's first hallucinogenic experience is eating fly agarics with his institute mate Gireyev, who has turned to various kinds of esoteric and Buddhist learnings.

Fly agaric is a sacred mushroom of Ishtar the most prominent female deity, feminine origin, and also a symbol of a starry sky.

In a similar manner Tatarsky perceives that the Biblical phrase – mixing of the tongues, or loss of ability to understand another person's language (which the Bible interprets as a consequence of divine wrath and the reason the Tower of Babel was left unfinished) should be understood literally as "mixing of the tongue" meaning that a heavily intoxicated person appears to others to be speaking "gibberish".

Since Amanita Pantherina is brown in colour unlike its red cousin Muscaria, and differs in its effects, it is likely the author implies that Tatarsky ingested both varieties.

While tripping on 5 hits of LSD with a picture of some Babylonian-looking idol character Tatarsky begins to see an uncanny parallel between the TV set and Chaldean altar for human sacrifice.

The TV through advertising incorporated in it, feeds the viewer to the flames of material consumption and Tatarsky, being a copywriter, begins to see himself as a serviceman of such an inferno.

The irony here is that if LSD does in fact make Tatarsky experience some form of spiritual enlightenment, then aesthetic enjoyment or clarity of thought do not seem to be among its necessary ingredients.

Pelevin employs a similar motif to one that belongs to William S. Burroughs namely of "one all-purpose blob" as a metaphor for a society subdued to consumerism.

Like Burroughs' blob, representing degradation of "ordinary men and women" to an organ that can fulfill their basic bodily needs, Pelevin's oranus represent degradation of an individual to a cell in biologically (if such term can be applied to a concept) primitive but at the same time powerful organism that governs our consumer habits.

In order to govern and spur the constant flow of money and goods, which play a role of blood and lymph, oranus uses media as a kind of nervous system to steer its cells' activity, namely selling and buying.

Pelevin presents rather far-fetched but not totally impossible vision of the world governed by virtual puppets created, upgraded and controlled by the media corporations.

Pelevin draws attention to the fact that the audience has no power to control media and the flow of information they deliver through press, television or the Internet.

[7] The novel's stylistic foundation is a legacy of Hemingway's intellectual romance, Salinger's adapted Buddhism, the Strugatsky brothers' esophic[check spelling] futurology with the addition of Castaneda's psychedelics and Irving Welsh's fractured ecstasy, as one Russian critic said about the novel.

The novel's episode of Che Guevara's spirit summoning shows man's dependence on television and his transformation into a "virtual subject.