Remote, Machiavellian, paranoid, brilliant, strategic, bumbling, obscure, technocratic, visionary, denialist, unifier, divisive - all terms that have been used to describe President Thabo Mbeki.

However, it is a less dramatic insight by Mbeki's longstanding friend Mel Gooding that biographer Mark Gevisser selects as central to understanding our leader.

Gooding said: "Perhaps what drives Thabo is the satisfaction of being or doing what was expected of him. It's a very different thing from ambition, but an immensely powerful motivation."

These expectations and how Mbeki has sought through the decades to meet them are outlined in Gevisser's book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.

Gevisser has spent the past eight years living and breathing the times and life of Mbeki; traversing between past and present from Moscow to Sussex to Pretoria and the countryside of the Eastern Cape. He interviewed the president's colleagues, his family, several former lovers and spent some 20 hours in conversations with Mbeki.

Yet, 800-odd pages later, Gevisser admits he is unable to say definitively that he knows Mbeki.

The inspiration to begin the mammoth task arose from Gevisser's desire to explore and chart South Africa's transition by profiling individuals and looking at their life stories as they "negotiated and effected the transition".

"Mbeki is the most important architect of our society whether we like it or not, and has governed for the past 15 years," Gevisser said in an interview, his defensive tone perhaps arising from the knowledge of just how much antagonism there is against Mbeki in certain quarters.

Gevisser says while he can indeed empathise with Mbeki - otherwise he would not have been able to write the book - biography by definition cannot be a full understanding of another's life.

"A life is unimaginable by anyone other than the person living the life," Gevisser said.

Adding to the challenge was that his high-profile protagonist had repeatedly defined himself as part of a collective, moved by considerations ideological rather than personal.

One of the themes that emerges in the book is how Mbeki - echoing the cool, detached intellectual approach of his famous father, communist stalwart Govan Mbeki, repeatedly transmutes emotion into political principle.

This is not the stuff ordinary people can relate to.

And still less understandable is Mbeki's lack of personal engagement in the attempt to find out what happened to his missing, presumed dead, son and the family's reticence in naming the person, previously a senior government figure in Lesotho, responsible for the death of Mbeki's brother, Jama.

Still, the tale of Mbeki's life is rather like a good novel - beginning on the road to Mbewuleni, Mbeki's birthplace, and tracing the ups and downs and reversals of fortune of not just Mbeki, but the ANC, its leaders and the country itself.

From the hills of Lesotho and the Eastern Cape to the president's official residence, Gevisser delineates a thread of destiny and mission that stretches from Mbeki's grandparents to his communist parents and finally to himself.

Gevisser comments that Mbeki was a "third-generation missionary" - his grandparents Christian, his parents communist while he himself sought redemption of his people and had a quest for "self determination", both individual and collective.

Gevisser said while Mbeki has often been described as a pragmatist, he is an idealist.

In the book Gevisser points out how Mbeki has through the years been something of a prophet in the wilderness - pushing for a political rather than military solution, winning Western support for the ANC in the face of his comrades' suspicions and later driving the ANC towards market forces.

His account of the president's childhood depicts an upbringing strangely dysfunctional and "disconnected" - a word Mbeki himself used. He had an absentee father and for most of his childhood and youth was away from home.

Mbeki was groomed for leadership - sent to study at Sussex and later Moscow and taken under the wing of OR Tambo, whose wife Adelaide regarded him as a son.

From the world of carefree students in the swinging 60s to Mbeki's eminently suitable marriage to Zanele Dlamini in a castle and the "zen security garden" (a dust yard with patterns scratched each evening and checked for disturbance each morning) surrounding the couple's home in the suburbs of Lusaka, the story of Thabo Mbeki's life embraces widely variant locations.

Later, as the country entered the negotiations phase, Mbeki would be living in still more disparate settings - as he whirled between covert encounters and high public profile meetings wooing big business, Afrikaners and the West; battling opponents and winning allies for his election as Nelson Mandela's deputy.

Along the way, Mbeki earned many epithets: he was dubbed "The Duke" by some comrades in Lusaka, compared to a weasel - elusive, agile, supple and quick - and termed the ANC's crown-prince by others.

One identity that Gevisser explores is Mbeki as a political seducer, pointing out how repeatedly the president won over possible antagonists and suggesting that much of the vitriol against him was born out of the inevitable sense of let-down by those who fell for his charms only to feel abandoned the next morning, so to speak.

Like any dramatic tale, Gevisser's book tracks the ups and owns and reversals of Mbeki's life but, given that this is not fiction but history in the making, there is no sense of closure to the tale.

That's because, as the book was being written and rewritten, the tumultuous events of the past few years were playing out in public life - notably the dismissal of deputy president and former Mbeki ally, Jacob Zuma, and the bitter succession battle within the ANC.

Gevisser said he was continuously having to revisit his words in the "heat and light" of current affairs.

He suggests that one reason so much bitterness has been directed at Mbeki was that when he became president, he was regarded by many as the "custodian of dreams".

So current is Gevisser's subject matter that his revelation that Mbeki knew beforehand that former National Prosecuting Authority boss Bulelani Ngcuka would state there was prima facie evidence of corruption on the part of Zuma occasioned heated statements from Zuma supporters this week.

In the interview, Gevisser said that some within Mbeki's inner circle had told him the president had never been particularly close to Zuma and the two ANC leaders' relationship had been a product of circumstance more than anything else.

Gevisser, however, thinks the two men once enjoyed a far closer relationship and said their rivalry was akin to a fallout between brothers. They were once regarded as the head and heart of leadership.

Gevisser said this could be seen in a broader context - in exile comrades had a "close, very intense, fraternal relationship", but often things got messed up after they came home. Once exiles had returned and society normalised, paths and ambitions inevitably diverged.

In the book Gevisser traces tensions between Mbeki and Zuma back to before Zuma became deputy president and suggests Mbeki and his circle had become disillusioned with Zuma but pushed for him to become deputy president to keep Winnie Madikizela-Mandela out of the running.

Mbeki's critics, however, were concerned that he was overly ambitious and had poor judgment, Gevisser writes.

Then came the fallout over claims of corruption in the multi-billion rand arms deal.

Gevisser said if the arms deal turns out to be the poisoned well, then Mbeki himself initially - whatever his intentions - contaminated the water.

Mbeki's fraught relationship with Zuma is not the only tension Gevisser traces.

He includes the divergent paths and styles chosen by Mbeki and slain SACP hero Chris Hani, longstanding tensions with SACP leader Joe slovo as well as with leftwing intellectual Pallo Jordan.

Intriguingly, Gevisser says Slovo always believed that an occasion when he had to call Mbeki to order while Mbeki was studying in Moscow was the root of the president's antipathy towards him.

Gevisser said he knew what this had involved but was not at liberty to reveal the details.

The author said bigger issues than a personal clash were at play.

Mbeki and his inner circle saw the SACP - the ANC ally that is now one of the president's loudest critics - in the light of a mere adjunct on the lines of the ANC's youth and women's structures.

With acknowledgements to Chiara Carter and Cape Argus.