A broad and pervasive theme of the novel is the metaphor of water as time, a metaphor which helps explain two (arguably three) appearances of Noah's Ark in the novel: the first a golden picture (reproduced on page 43 of the text) in the Freemasons' temple of the Great Eastern Hotel, London; the second a toy Noah's Ark in the hermetically sealed billiards room of Iver Grove, a then abandoned estate on the outskirts of postwar Oxford (later home to Tom Stoppard); and the third (arguably) the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.[5]
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