Make no mistake about it. The Singapore story is his story.

This first volume of Lee's memoirs begins and ends with chapters zooming in on the event that thrust Singapore onto the international stage as an independent, sovereign political entity: her separation or expulsion from Malaysia, depending on the vantage point from which you view this seminal event. Between these two frame chapters, you get a continuous narrative that charts Lee's personal history from his birth up to his role as midwife in that other, equally momentous birth.

Midwife? Perhaps parenthood sits better on Lee's shoulders. Certainly, anyone who reads this book and presumes to take everything in it at face value would think a subtitle along the lines of "Founding Father of Modern Singapore" quite apt.

Lee tells us in his Preface that he had not intended to write his memoirs but was persuaded to do so three years ago by ruling People's Action Party (PAP) stalwart Lim Kim San, chairman of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), the holding company which groups together all the Singapore newspapers except for a small Tamil-language daily.

Lee adds that a further motivation for him to set to work on his memoirs was the spectre of an overconfident generation that needs to be made to understand "how vulnerable Singapore was and is, the dangers that beset us, and how we nearly did not make it".

A constant theme that Lee and other PAP cadres go back to again and again in their speeches is the vulnerability of their city-state to various external and internal threats, whether it be the vagaries of international trade and international politics, Singapore's lack of natural resources, or more insidious subversive elements within Singaporean society. Hence all that talk about nation-building and forging a Singaporean identity that would pull everyone together to work for the common weal.

This book is really another brick in that grand edifice which the PAP has toiled over the years to erect: the Singaporean nation. Lee's remarks in his Preface suggest this is in many ways a collective effort. He had a team of people from SPH to help him with the research and the editing of the book, and he even names a couple of people who "improved the flow of my narrative".

The narrative does read well even if it is somewhat bland andperfunctory. There is no concession to any idiosyncrasy of style here. An interesting feature of the text, quite apart from the fact that we are getting it all more or less from the horse's mouth, are significant chunks of text lifted off various kinds of documents unearthed by Lee's team of researchers, including correspondence between Singapore and Malaysian leaders and reports written by British colonial officials, which throw an interesting light on the political manoeuvrings and negotiations that attended the events of the tumultuous decade between 1955 and 1965.

It is entirely apt that SPH, an acknowledged mouthpiece of the PAP, should have collaborated with Lee to produce this book and thrust upon it a role somewhat like that of a national epic that would be to the putative Singaporean nation what the Aeneid, say, was to Ancient Rome.

You have all the elements of an epic here. The most important ingredient in any epic is the hero. Like in any epic, The Singapore Story recounts the birth, the childhood and the education of the hero. The hero himself tells us about his early days in Singapore, his adventures during the period of the Japanese occupation, and his education in England. This is all spiced up by tantalising bits about his courtship of a young woman and their hush-hush marriage in England.

The main thrust of the narrative of course begins with Lee's involvement in politics, which, interestingly enough, dates back to his days in England when he spent a couple of weeks helping a friend campaign for a seat in the House of Commons in the 1950 British elections.

This account, which properly begins with his early days as a lawyer in Singapore representing labour activists in court and takes us right up to Singapore's abrupt full independence, sets out in detail his role as the prime moving force in Singapore politics in the past half-century and for a while his brief if prominent role in Malaysian politics.

Along the way, he manages to talk about and, most interesting of all, comment on a whole panoply of major figures who have made their mark on the political scene on both sides of the Causeway.

It is this aspect of the book that has given politicians and various organisations here yet another excuse for rattling their sabres at the unfriendly neighbour down south and elicited heated comment and riposte in the Press from academics, and members of the general public. The question we are all asking ourselves is of course this: what is the hidden agenda here?

Perhaps there is none. Perhaps the public outcry raised by The Singapore Story in this country is just a symptom of a more deep-seated set of problems underlying the relationship between the two countries as a whole. There is the one-upmanship which permeates the relationship between them at all levels, there is the feeling of insecurity and suspicion about each other's intentions, and at the bottom of it all there always lurks the racial factor. This last is a theme which recurs again and again in the book, beginning with Lee's account of his first encounter of what he calls "Malayism" during his time at Raffles College.

Every epic presents us with an enemy, a worthy opponent to pit against the hero. In The Singapore Story, there are two enemies, communism and communalism, though in some ways, the book presents them as two faces of the same enemy.

Communism looms large in the earlier chapters of the book and here, Lee reveals to us, as never before, the motives which led him and his PAP mates to make use of the communists in the `50s in their bid for power and we get from the mastermind himself, a blow-by-blow account of how the PAP subsequently got rid of and effectively silenced their bedfellows when they had become a liability and were threatening to take control of the party. It all makes a fascinating read, even if you get only one side of the story.

The communist threat to the PAP government in Singapore was of course intimately bound up with the issue of Chinese communalism. Large chunks of the book deal with how Lee came to terms with the Chinese-educated Chinese population of Singapore, first to win their votes, then to infiltrate and to expose and finally to neutralise the communist forces which found their natural stronghold within this constituency.

Lee sets himself up as the champion of multi-racialism, pitting himself first against the forces of Chinese chauvinism and the communist elements within the Chinese community in Singapore, then against the Malay-dominated polity that was taking shape within the newly-constituted Malaysia. He expresses remorse at having let down "several million people in Malaysia" whose hopes of resisting Malay hegemony he had aroused with his aggressive platform of multi-racialism.

Lee's account of the years 1963-65 raises many questions. What was it he was really after? What led him, after having harangued his electorate in Singapore to accept merger with Malaysia, to mount an aggressive bid for power on a multiracial platform that almost guaranteed Singapore's expulsion from the Federation? Was it a selfless dedication to a worthy cause? Did he fail so miserably to read and understand the situation correctly? Was it a simple case of I want power and I want it now?

One thing that comes across very strongly in this book is the obsessive, ruthless streak in Lee's personality. Behind everything that he recounts about his life in this book, behind every of his actions, behind every motive which he reveals, one word lurks: power.

Here is a man born to wield power in one way or another, and it is the circumstances of his life, as well as his temperament, which have conspired to make him wield power so completely, so effectively and so ruthlessly.