| Normal Sheeple | |
| Author: | Paul Howard |
| Illustrator: | Alan Clarke |
| Cover Artist: | Alan Clarke |
| Country: | Republic of Ireland |
| Genre: | Comic novel, satire |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Language: | English |
| Media Type: | Print: paperback |
| Series: | Ross O'Carroll-Kelly |
| Preceded By: | Braywatch |
| Dewey: | 823.92 |
| Set In: | Dublin and County Kerry, 2018 |
| Isbn: | 9781844885497 |
| Followed By: | Once Upon a Time in… Donnybrook |
Normal Sheeple is a 2021 book by Irish playwright and author Paul Howard and is the twenty-first novel in the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly series.[1] [2]
The title refers to the Sally Rooney novel Normal People and its TV adaptation (Ross' relationship with Marianne is written in a parody of Rooney's style),[3] and to the phrase "sheeple", used to refer to people who show herd behaviour, but also perhaps referring to Kerry people as "sheep people."[4]
Charles is Taoiseach, and Sorcha is appointed to his cabinet. Honor attends a Gaeltacht summer college, making her first rugby-playing boyfriend, and Ross takes up Gaelic football, playing for An Ghaeltacht GAA in County Kerry.[5] [6]
In The Irish Times, Eugene O'Brien wrote that "Howard’s satire is as sharp as ever, with a parallel Ireland existing more concretely in this latest book, which sheds interesting lights on the real Ireland […] Howard keeps the reader off balance by developing seemingly flat characters into whole new levels of complexity."[3]
In The Stinging Fly, Kevin Power wrote "Our rulers serve themselves: the books remind us of this fact repeatedly. They gratify overtly our secret contempt for the powerful. On the other hand, Ross is a “beloved character”. There he sits, at the heart of our popular culture, reminding us that our society is unjust; that our elites are shallow and self-serving; and that materialist greed is a hollow pursuit. We love him. We think he’s great. And his family and friends, that nest of vipers: we love them, too. Should we? Of course we should. That’s how class works. The Ross books enable us safely both to love and to fear our rulers; to envy their wealth and to disapprove of their behaviour; to experience naked capitalist ambition and sheer class hatred at one and the same time and without contradiction; to map the shifting landscapes of an increasingly unstable world." He also noted that "Ross books are masterpieces of denotative realism. A century from now, an interested cultural historian will be able to reconstruct a near-total catalogue of contemporary upper-middle-class lifestyle accoutrements from Howard’s pages: the clothes, drinks, food, make-up, coffee machines, music, movies, actors and actresses."[7]