At the time, I knew nothing about the author and read the book as if it were written by a latter-day St Francis who communed with otters the same way the saint did with birds.

Maxwell died in 1969. A biography written by his friend and doppelganger Richard Frere in the mid-1970s told of a complex and troubled individual. Maxwell was married to the poet Kathleen Raine, but Frere revealed him as homosexual. A subsequent biography by Douglas Botting also tracked Maxwell’s personal struggles and suggested that he suffered from bipolar disorder.

And so I undertook my second reading of Ring Of Bright Water in this handsome quinquagenary reissue in the knowledge that it was written by a real man and not a mythological figure. Perhaps this is why, though the text is unchanged, there seem to be many things in it that weren’t there the first time.

I didn’t expect, for instance, to find that Maxwell’s relationship with animals would now appear so problematic. He acquires the otter Mijbil from the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and drives with it to the airport in Basra in a taxi travelling “like a ricocheting bullet” (a simile he would hesitate to use today). From there he flies to London, with “Mij” spending most of the time in the passenger cabin, and installs it in his studio flat. During the day he takes the otter around West Kensington on a lead (on one occasion to Harrods). This reads now like an affectation on his part and a humiliation of the animal. In fact, the entire process of acquiring, transporting and housing the otter is replete with ethical issues.

Maxwell and Mij move on to his cottage at Camusfearna (Sandaig) in the West Highlands where he admires the otter for its intelligence, curiosity and, perhaps most of all, its love of him. Not all wild things are as lucky. Whales are admired for their intelligence too, unless they happen to be killer whales. Maxwell says he “would compass their deaths by any means”. Indeed, he advises a friend on how to shoot one. He laments the pain inflicted on whales by harpoons, yet previously owned a business on Soay harpooning basking sharks and rendering them into oil. The difference seems to be that sharks are considered stupid. The other way that Maxwell ranks animals is by their attitude to him, and so a faithful dog or a loving otter are treasured, but not the “Killer” nor a ring-tailed lemur (“the abominable Kiko”) which is put in a zoo.

There’s a kind of ranking system applied to humans as well. Maxwell gives the distinct impression that he doesn’t like people very much. Two exceptions are the MacKinnons, his closest neighbours at Camusfearna. He likes Calum Murdo MacKinnon for his vast knowledge of politics and classic literature. But he has an even greater admiration for Calum’s wife Morag and her rapport with animals. Her philosophy of life sounds as if it could be his: “She frankly finds more to like and to love in animals than in human beings.”

At the other end of the scale from Morag, there is the Marsh Arab woman he met in Iraq while travelling with writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger: “I felt an unreasonable hatred for that witless woman with her show of bustle and confidence, and contempt that not even her avarice had conquered her stupidity.”

And it is hard to read Maxwell now without thinking of Kathleen Raine, who provided the title for the book in her poem The Marriage Of Psyche (“He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water /Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea”). She is mentioned by name just once and then only to explore her relationship with the otter. The rest of the time she is a shadow-presence, a “companion” or “guest” or the other voice when Maxwell hears a conversation between the literary editor of the New Statesman and someone else at Camusfearna and realises he has a visitor. Worst of all, Raine is the “friend” who travels ahead from London to Camusfearna with Mijbil and inadvertently allows it to escape and be killed. This episode ended their marriage.

Rereading Ring Of Bright Water reminded me, in a general way, of re-watching the film of the original Woodstock Festival. In the latter case, I can still enjoy the music and long for the prevailing sentiments. And yet I know now that I am watching future impresarios, lawyers, doctors and supporters of the Bush administration. And I suddenly notice young middle-class white America (as it was) phoning home for more money so that it can continue to set its soul free. We are Starbucks, we are golden.

Maxwell was also selling a land and nature myth that I was all too eager to believe. Reading him again, I see that Camusfearna was a kind of extended summer retreat and not the lifestyle I thought it was the first time. And yet whenever he arrives there in the spring and describes the wildcats, or the deer, or the elvers in the burn, in words that shine, it’s possible to imagine for a moment that I am reading it for the first time and that it’s all true.

Ring Of Bright Water

by Gavin Maxwell

(Little Toller Books, £10)