I love reading new books but I find equal joy in rediscovering old friends – or frenemies

Sometimes, re-reading a novel is like slipping on a favourite old jumper. You know you’re going to get warmth and comfort.

Other times it can be as discomfiting as plunging into an ice bath.

Either way, you know what you’re in for.

I’ve entered an age bracket where even with interregnums of eight or 10 years I’ve re-read some favourite books at least five times.

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I love reading new books. Or long-ago-published works for the first time. But for every 10 new acquaintances there is likely to be one old friend – or frenemy.

Last year I wrote about re-reading an old frenemy – Melville’s Moby-Dick – for a third time. Despite the novel’s many challenges it gripped my heart and invaded my subconscious in a way it hadn’t previously. I dreamed of the leviathan. Began reading everything about spermaceti. Talked, at times, to family like Ishmael and Ahab.

Its 654 pages were a welcome transportation during Sydney’s brief Covid lockdown. Its reward is the journey and, if I’m honest, the satisfaction of just finishing it. Maybe forever now.

Every few years, meanwhile, something compels me to revisit Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time. Notwithstanding McEwan’s gift as a stylist and as master distiller of time, this remains at once one of the most deeply human and disturbing novels on my shelves. How to live without answers after the sudden, unexplained vanishment of your three-year-old child?

It haunts. It plays to the deepest fears of imperfect parenthood. Its central question is: what makes the human spirit endure, to choose life, in the throes of such torturous mystery and trauma? Perversely, perhaps, I emerge feeling stronger, more humanly resilient, with each reading.

That’s a segue of sorts to William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. Reading it for the first time upon release in London in 2002, I was walking the neighbourhood of Boyd’s protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, novelist, art dealer and spy, and the cast of people – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Picasso and Hemingway during the Spanish civil war, the duke and Wallis Simpson among them – who meander through his long, eventful life.

Narrated through Mountstuart’s diary entries, it’s a life of fortune and temperamental folly. From astounding early authorial success and dealing in the New York art world, it is a kind of literary Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that brought the protagonist circuitously to my London neighbourhood (though three decades earlier), by which time he was surviving on dog food and sales of a revolutionary newspaper which brought him into the realm of the Baader-Meinhof gang. What a ride! Something new reveals itself with each read. But that’s not why I return to it. It is more for the wry emotional poignancy it evokes via the self-assessing Mountstuart eye, which recognises life is at once no rehearsal and something of an infinite jest. I’m about due to re-read it for a fourth time.

I rarely read poetry. Or any book in one sitting. So, I was astonished when I read in a day Robin Robertson’s The Long Take – a 226-page “noir narrative” of prose poetry about Walker, a D-day veteran with post-traumatic stress in New York and Los Angeles from 1946 to 1953. Through a kaleidoscopic monologue, Walker flashes back to Europe from the New York docks and, later, the jungle of LA streets he walks (“That is his name and nature”) as a newspaperman gifting story to the forgotten who the bursting city rejects.

It is one of the most incisive and evocative things I’ve read about post-traumatic stress. It is mesmerising. Beautiful. A tormented soul and a troubled mind is vulnerably exposed here – and then compassionately parsed. I wanted more. I read it twice in as many weeks. Again, it’s a book with great insight into humanity. Like The Child in Time, at times both a warm jumper and an ice bath.

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I can open it at any page, as I have today, and be profoundly moved and disturbed. It tells me to read more poetry.

Now to a new friend. In 1956, Australian writer Charmian Clift published Mermaid Singing, her memoir of life on (the isolated and very poor) Greek island Kalymnos, to which she had escaped from Australia via London with her husband, novelist George Johnston. I’ve written previously about my (somewhat obsessive) reading and re-reading of Johnston’s “Meredith trilogy”, most notably his 1964, Miles Franklin-winning My Brother Jack. Ancillary to that I’d read Clift’s 1959 elegant and courageously honest memoir of life, love, creativity and social intrigue on Hydra where she, Johnston and their children lived until 1964.

But this year reading Mermaid Singing – just rereleased along with Clift’s Peel Me A Lotus by the UK’s Muswell Press – closed the circle on Clift, Johnston and their expatriate years for me. British writer Polly Samson, whose remarkable recent novel A Theatre for Dreamers features Clift as a character, writes in her forward of “tough island life” in a place whose “honey days are done”.

The male inhabitants are nearly all sponge-divers. That’s a perilous occupation. Countless island men have died or been disfigured by “the bends”. It’s an island of pain, a colony of the maimed. This is a memoir about trauma and self-discovery, by a woman, barely 30, eclipsed in life by her (eventually famous) husband. It’s a reminder, again, of her elegant writerly ease, dexterity and acute eye. And what a living literary giant she’d have become had she not suicided in Sydney in 1969 at 45.

A book of sun and sparkling water, yes. But knowing what became of Clift just 13 years later lends it another layer of unsettling, though compelling, memorial complexity.

It leaves me with a sense of life continuing to write itself beyond the pages.

• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org