‘Memory as slippery as a melon seed.’

So wrote Frank Dalby Davison in a letter to his mother in 1945. And memory in its trickiest forms is before the reader’s mind throughout Owen Webster’s semi-, demi­biography of Davison -·’semi’ because, though Webster described this book as a ‘non-fiction novel’ it relies so heavily on Davison’s fiction for ‘facts’ that one might better call it ‘fictional biography’: ‘demi’ because it deals only with the first thirty years of Davison’s life (and with his forbears). Webster, a most assiduous collector of material, had planned a second volume (predictably with the provisional title of The Inward Journey), but died in 1975 before completing his work.