by JULIET WATERS

"The subject of my biography was an ordinary man, and a poorly behaved one at that," writes Jessica Warner in the preface to her highly readable, quirky work of popular history The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist. "He broke into peoples' houses and held up stagecoaches. When he worked - and this he did as little as possible - he showed up late and stole from his employers. Once he shot a dog. He even raped a woman who was innocently tending her sheep. Then, in the autumn of 1776, his behavior took a decided turn for the worse."

It was then that James Aitken, aka John the Painter, got the idea to burn down two British towns that were home to the British Navy's dockyards. This plan was actually endorsed by a high-ranking American diplomat, and had it worked, the Americans would probably have won the revolution earlier. Fortunately for the citizens of those cities, the plan failed. Aitken, however, was tried, which earned him a period of notoriety if nothing else. Historically, his actions are significant because they provided an excuse for the British to suspend due process for American privateers, the unlawful combatants of that era. While they languished in prison, John the Painter's body hung from the mast of the ship from which he was hanged. There it remained for 40 years, a common practice at the time, to remind ordinary citizens the value of staying ordinary.

Aitken is not a guy Warner has much respect for. Moreover, his story is a difficult one to tell because he's far from the romantic criminal a reader might be seduced by. Often he's just a dolt. His Highwayman period is especially pathetic, considering he didn't even have a horse. More like the majority of criminals, he's a creepy, often incompetent narcissist.

Fortunately, Warner has personality to spare, and with wit and insight she's able to weave a fascinating story around this less-than-fascinating man. The Incendiary is as much an eye-opening history lesson on the horrific lives of the common poor in the 18th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, as it is a biography of a young man whose real accomplishment - and back then it was no small one - was survival. Warner's approach is something of a cross between the kind of popular history of the underworld you might find by American historians like Luc Sante, and the erudite, speculative meandering of British historians like Simon Winchester. An eclectic academic, Warner is a research scientist at Yale's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and also a history professor at the University of Toronto. This explains the unusual focus of her first book Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason.

While she's no admirer of Aitken, she's not without empathy. Much will probably be made by critics of the parallels between how the superpower at the time exploited his actions, and the policies of another superpower we know. But there are subtler parallels here that are also worth thinking about. The circumstances that helped to create a John the Painter are recognizable. Take one superpower, one country where the poor are generally better educated than most, but whose citizens face an especially dismal amount of discrimination and hopelessness (in this era, Scotland) and one sociopath, and you have a reasonably good recipe for a terrorist. John the Painter had little hope of a decent life, but the curiously progressive education system in Scotland made him smart enough to know where to take out his anger.

He's a pathetic figure in a strangely powerful and entertaining book that may restore some of the fame he knew so briefly. And though this was not his intention, it may also throw a little light on the countless people who, for reasons that might be more difficult to understand, don't become terrorists.

The Incendiary by Jessica Warner,
McClelland & Stewart, 298pp, $32.99