Here, make no mistake, is wondrous hagiography. It depends on 23 hours of personal interviews graciously donated by its subject. It relies, for supporting evidence, on the good opinions of his friends (or of those too cowed to utter a word out of place). It becomes curiously tolerant when oppression, corruption and galloping megalomania are on the menu. But, mush and slush notwithstanding, it is also a fascinating, cleverly orchestrated snow job: quite probably the hagiography of the year.

And the puzzle - indeed, the great puzzle about Nursultan Nazarbayev, supreme leader of the ninth-largest country in the world and its burgeoning oil reserves - is why he should be remotely concerned about burnishing his image thus, because relentless PR offensives actually sell him short.

A few years ago, I went to one such PR event in Almaty, a conference on the big issues of journalism, blandly fronted by old CNN hands. My session was all about press freedom - and freedom campaigners from the surrounding -stans had their uncowed morning in the spotlight. They didn't shut up. They attacked, as the president's men sat glowering. But why, you wondered, get into this fine, embarrassing mess in the first place?

The answer, which Jonathan Aitken can't really get round to supplying, is that Nursultan Nazarbayev is an amazing and amazingly conflicted man: the son of a shepherd who couldn't read, the brightest boy in his school, a sheet-metal worker turned metallurgist, a rising communist star as the Soviet empire withered and died. Talent saw him rise through the ranks of stultified bureaucracy and made him president of Kazakhstan. Sheer talent helped him negotiate his way out of the union and overcome an endless series of crises that threatened his fledgling state. Natural talent underpinned his Caspian deals with Chevron, Mobil and the rest, helped him build pipelines to the west and enabled him to set out his stall as one of the world's great energy suppliers.

He succeeded because, in the midst of stumbling gerontocracy, he was the brightest and the best. He's a brilliant wheeler-dealer, formidable orator, tireless toiler - and consumer of local vodka - and a politician Gorbachev describes here as "consistently right on the big issues ... a leader who handled the disaster [of Soviet disintegration] better than any of the other newly independent countries".

He masterminded the end of Kazakhstan's nuclear arsenal with passionate conviction. He reached out to Beijing and Moscow with the shrewdness of a natural statesman. Nazarbayev doesn't need building up or sanitising; his record speaks for itself.

But this book, by its very existence, somehow says that this isn't enough. He wants to be seen as an embryo democrat, a paternalist bringer of education and harmony to a bewilderingly multi-ethnic land. He cherishes his meetings with Thatcher just as much as those with Yeltsin. He welcomes Aitken just as enthusiastically as Jonathan's old chum from BAe and al-Yamamah contract days, Sir Dick Evans, now chairman of Samruk, "the state holding company named after the mythical Kazakh bird that lays golden eggs".

So, suddenly, nothing quite fits. His senior son-in-law, head of the tax police, counter-terrorism policy and Kazakhstan's main TV station, falls out with Nazarbayev in spectacular fashion - and keeps turning up as ambassador to Austria amid melodramatic tales of coups, murders and rampant corruption only the de Medicis would understand. Meanwhile, Nazarbayev, who railed as a young man against Moscow's centralist idiocy in building vast steel plants in the middle of nowhere, decides to move Kazakhstan's capital to the middle of nowhere and creates wind-blown, freezing or sweltering Astana as the Singapore of the Steppes on the grounds that Almaty, with its 28 nightclubs, hasn't got enough building land free.

Aitken, foot on the softest pedals going, can't make much sense of any of this. He is stuck with either praising or pursing his lips. He cannot paint Nazarbayev's full, florid, fantastic mix of contradictions. But he tells an essentially simplified story with practised skill: at least he puts Kazakhstan where it firmly belongs - near the top of any intensive diplomatic reading list for the 21st century.