It is not every biographer who can claim that he, like his subject, has served a prison sentence. Jonathan Aitken, a former British M.P. and cabinet minister, served a seven-month sentence for perjury in a civil case. Charles Colson went to prison in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

But the parallels go deeper. Both men are conservatives, and like Colson, Aitken has also had a religious conversion and embarked on the kind of prison ministry that Colson has pursued ever since leaving jail in 1973. Their shared experiences, Aitken argues, provides the biographer with “some unusual, possibly unique insights into Colson’s story.”

I’m not sure about unique or even unusual, but certainly Aitken gives Colson a fair and sympathetic hearing. The biographer is not quick to judge his subject, and he does full justice to the complexity, if not the contradictions, of the man. Even better, Colson has given Aitken access to a range of sources that makes for an authoritative, if not authorized, biography. It is a “warts and all” tale, Aitken assures his readers.

Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger, one of Aitken’s sources, asks him, “Are you sure Colson is for real?” Colson once had a reputation as Richard Nixon’s hatchet man – a fierce political operative – and when Colson was born again, it was not surprising that his sincerity was questioned.

After reading Aitken’s narrative, I have no doubt that Colson is “for real.” Many examples of his good works, having nothing whatsoever to do with rehabilitating his reputation, convince me that his conversion is genuine and long-lasting. This devout man will not countenance divorce, for example, and he has even lost close friends because of his adamant belief in the sanctity of marriage. That he has been a sinner, that he has been divorced, makes Colson not a hypocrite but a reformed man who earnestly wishes others to get religion as well.

Yet there is a warped part of Colson’s nature, which Aitken sometimes acknowledges but does not fully explore. The good that Colson does is sometimes undermined almost immediately by evil. In 1961, for example, he courageously hired an African-American associate at a time when not one major law firm in Boston (where Colson’s firm was headquartered) would do so. Colson’s own partner believed the hiring would cost the firm business. Colson went ahead, and he did not lose business.

But then he thought it would be fun to light a huge, burning cross on the associate’s front lawn! Colson never apologized and apparently never troubled himself to discover that the Ku Klux Klan had once burnt his associate’s wife’s family out of their home. If it seems unfair to dwell on an incident so deep into Colson’s past, consider what he deems to be the lesson of Watergate. Aitken reports a prison scene in which Colson is sermonizing to prisoners:

Jesus had Judas. Nixon had John Dean. Because of both those betrayals, twelve men came under pressure. Those of us around Nixon at that time could have been called twelve of the most powerful people in the world. But we twelve powerful men couldn’t hold a lie together for two weeks. … But none of them snitched. None of them copped a plea by confessing to their tormentors. … They were willing to die for something they knew to be true. No one ever gives up their lives for what they know is untrue. But the disciples were willing to give up their lives because they knew that the resurrection of Christ is true. So do you and so do I. He is risen!

This is muddled theology, to say the least, and Aitken relates this incoherent rant without comment. Biographers do not have to judge their subjects, but they have some responsibility to point out nonsense; otherwise the reader loses confidence in the biographer’s ability to read his subject.

This passage comes so early on in the biography that I can imagine a reader throwing the book away in disgust. That would be a mistake. This is a searching look at a very complicated man. Colson is fascinating to watch, and for every outrageous thing he does, there is a redeeming action that partially justifies Aitken’s subtitle.

Aitken is a pedestrian writer. For example, when Colson separates from his first wife, his father is described as being deployed by Colson’s fierce mother as a “heat-seeking missile” who “locked onto Patty,” the woman Colson fell in love with and who became his second wife. A few pages later we learn about the “flames of attraction” between Colson and Patty.

But Aitken has done his homework. The early pages establish Colson’s position in Boston society as a “swamp Yankee,” a “label given to the poorer white Protestants of old Boston, who had never been accepted by the upwardly mobile denizens of the Harvard and Brahmin establishments living in the smart residential districts in and around Beacon Hill.” Colson had to “jostle alongside the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the Slavs, and other ethnic groups.” As a result, he was remarkably free of the Boston elite’s complacent racism. But his lack of status meant he felt he could succeed only by breaking the rules.

On balance, Colson’s is a life redeemed up to a point. But no biographer – and publisher, for that matter – would stand for such an awkward title as that, even if it conveys the awkward truth.