Some Penguin Classics remain obstinately unclassifiable, no matter how many times you read them. Look, for instance, at Penguin’s 1986 paperback of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the deeply, deceptively strange 1904 work by Henry Adams. On the surface, it looks like a passionately impressionistic travelogue of the type that was enormously popular at the turn of the 20^th century; Adams travels to France, tours the famous buildings there – most especially Mont Saint Michel and Chartres – characteristically buries himself in researching the history of those buildings, and then writes a book about it.

But as Raymond Carney writes in his Introduction to this Penguin edition, “If Mont Saint Michel is a tour guide, it is one only in the sense in which Thoreau’s Walden, Melville’s Typee, Hawthorne’s ‘The Custom-House,’ or Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ might be said to be.”

Instead of a guidebook, we get what Carney rightly calls a “narration of a voyage of the imagination across interior landscapes.” In chapter after gorgeously-written chapter, Adams starts with some handful of little anchoring details and then spins broad crystalline superstructures into which those anchoring details vanish like background threads in a vast tapestry. It happens again and again, in chapters like “The Court of the Queen of Heaven,” or the stunning chapter on Peter Abelard, or the mysterious “Towers and Portals,” which opens with deceptive mildness: “For a first visit to Chartres, choose some pleasant morning when the lights are soft, for one wants to be welcome, and the Cathedral has moods, at times severe. At best, the Beauce is a country none too gay.”

And in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, as in Adams’ other masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, when his narrative wanders onto the subject of “the sacred female,” that narrative promptly doubles in both power and flat-out oddness, as in the book’s greatest chapter, “The Virgin of Chartres”:

The church is wholly given up to the Mother and Son. The Father seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least, this is the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus absorbed into the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is no affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.

This Penguin Classic volume even goes the extra mile of strangeness but letting Carney digress like a nickel-plated loon elsewhere in his Introduction:

Darwinian notions of evolutionary descent, struggle, continuity, gradualism, and progress defined an absolutely supreme and increasingly unquestioned fiction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England and America. (It is a fiction our culture is still under the spell of.) But what is interesting is Adams’ double attitude toward it. He was not only one of the few contemporaries of Darwin to recognize Darwinism as a mere metaphor and fiction, not as a law of nature or fact of life, but having done that, he … went on not to argue against it or to reject it, but to embrace it (as a fiction) anyway …

In case you’re wondering how good old Queen Victoria is doing over in London, recall: this Introduction, its author adamantly demanding that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a fiction, was written in 1986, not 1886. So this Penguin edition has the curious distinction of giving us a text-Introduction written in 1986 by a scholar with less scientific knowledge than the text’s author had in 1904. With any other text, it might have been jarring enough to warrant prompt revision – but with Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, it seems almost fitting.