Many readers have expanded their ambitions in these times of social isolation, disappearing into books that have previously beaten them.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is mentioned often, along with Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.

I decided on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or The Whale. I’d tried to read it in secondary school and never quite got there. But I went all the way in my 20s. And when the world started shutting down in the pandemic, elements of Moby-Dick surfaced in my mind like the leviathan breaching before the Pequod.

Something about my memories of Moby-Dick resonated with how I felt facing the unknowns of isolation, about what the months ahead might hold for the world while we watched the vainglorious president sacrifice his people in their tens of thousands and plunge America into darkness to sate his self-lust and stop-at-nothing fixation on re-election.

The zeitgeist made me want to go full-journey into the frightening unknown again with Ishmael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Stubb, Flask and the rest of the eclectic, multicultural crew as they followed the equally monomaniacal Captain Ahab into his frightening abyss of revenge against Moby Dick.

In 2008 Stephen Kinzer observed that Moby-Dick was “an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation’s epic”. Kinzer cast White House incumbent George W Bush as Ahab and, as his whale, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, revenge against whom no price in American lives and treasure seemed too expensive.

Now Trump blames everyone else for his own manifest failings as man and president, his revenge worn most acutely by the legions of his dead and dying citizens.

Those who haven’t read the novel might have seen John Huston’s 1956 movie with Gregory Peck as Ahab. Regardless, most know it doesn’t end well as they sail into darkness, towards that spectacular moment of mutual destruction.

Two months in, I’m savouring the novel, reading a few pages daily as we sail closer to the moment of truth amid compelling digressions into cetology (the chapter on who’s who in the whale world somehow remains, while wholly extraneous to plot and narrative, the stuff of writerly genius), ships, harpoons, sea ecology, the tension between the economy and environment – and extinction.

This time round I’ve found Ahab more disturbed and disturbing. Melville’s characters – especially the crew – are more intriguing as the Pequod sails ever further from New Bedford’s safe harbour. It’s a fabulous slow-burn (654 pages plus illustrations), the tension rising and falling with the seas ventured.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals – morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.

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Melville was generous – and compassionate – to his characters, not least the crew, whose portrayal defies the Darwinian racial mores of the day. They are all colours and, while America was when he wrote (and remains) divided on race, none were enslaved; free men sailing for themselves.

Some say this is a book about everything and always one for the times, no matter what they might be (the Pequod encounters an epidemic). But perhaps timelessness is the true measure of a great novel. It’s certainly about love, ballasted with the bromance or, perhaps, something more erotic, between Ishmael and Queequeg (the tattooed islander), whose hilarious first meeting occurs on a dark and stormy night in a double bed in a guesthouse for whalers.

After an initial terror on encountering Queequeg, who’d been out late trying to sell a human head, Ishmael muses:

I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

A little later, “ ... he [Queequeg] pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be”.

Moby-Dick defeats many readers. Others find their reward in repeated readings, surrendering to its ebbs and flows, its meanderings, intrigues, its madness and unbearable crescendos, with its consuming, hypnotic language, all of which Sylvia Plath precisely short-handed with: “I am reading Moby-Dick ... am whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical and craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris-miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan. One of my few wishes: to be (safe, coward that I am) aboard a whale ship through the process of turning a monster to light & heat.”

Margaret Drabble, having made several abortive attempts before succeeding, wrote, “Melville’s first hand experience of the varieties of human nature was peculiar, and his expression of it is epic. This is a book full of a wild hope.”

To hope I’d also add fear, twins in our life journeys through light and dark.

Not convinced? Try before you buy; dip into the online Gutenberg version. Or listen to the famous narrate it on the Moby-Dick Big Read, beginning with Tilda Swinton uttering perhaps the most famous opening words from the first chapter of an American novel.

“Call me Ishmael.”

Ishmael, who comes to know danger too well, is a man for these most fearful of times.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist