A wild people - Hugh Leonard

'She was too old for you,' TJ Quill's friend, Liz, says about his Italian mistress. 'Not that old,' TJ protests. 'At least two thousand years,' Liz says. It's a warning. Josie might be untameable - a slippery madonna who presents a different face to each beholder - but she's often left standing by the rest of TJ's friends. Perhaps it is true that, as the Kerry poet, the Oozer Kenirons, declares, the Irish are only three generations away from the old bog road, the tenement and back lane, and are busy reinventing themselves. Certainly the cast of A Wild People are forever surprising each other - and themselves. TJ's progress through a doomed friendship with 'Thorn' Thornton ('In my Father's house there are many pies, and I want a finger in every one of them') imbrangles him in the staging of a Plautus satire, retitled Lust and performed at night on a hurricane-whipped bog, as well as the most traumatic awards dinner of TJ's chequered career. His affair with Josie drags him from clandestine dinners in Dublin to the high drama of a ransom mission in Florence.;His job as archivist to great Western filmmaker Sean O'Fearna involves him in nailbiting interactions with the fearsome Widow O'Fearna. And throughout A Wild People there plays out the story of TJ's foundering marriage to the enigmatic but never-to-be-underrated Greta: a marriage that moves from couplehood in a cottage to uneasy truce in a Martello tower, and reaches its crisis with a car's night-time plunge into the sea...