Florentine Fog

And to think it was all going so well last Monday.
I can only liken it to something I'm doing quite frequently at the moment.
Driving up onto high Dartmoor.
It can be bright sunshine in town and all's well with the world. You set off humming and singing on the road up to Princetown admiring the scenery, drinking in the vast expanses of moorland, feeling at one with it all and telling yourself how lucky you are. Even slowing up behind the 25mph ooh-aah mare and foal-spotting convoy doesn't phase you because the world's spinning on the right axis today.
The steep hill out of Tavistock is fondly known as Pork Hill and this is where the trouble can start.
A gentle mist may start to swirl and the sun dulls down, as you climb higher the mist begins to swaddle you and the sun has now disappeared. The pony-spotting convoy is now on red alert at 10mph and it's a veritable pea-souper, a real cloud of unknowing and even for those familiar with the road it becomes almost impossible to know exactly where you are.
And it had all been going so well with The Enchantress of Florence until about page 133 or so. In fact here I was revelling in my first Salman Rushdie read, getting a bit too sure of myself obviously and shrugged off that little swirling mist that suddenly caused me to lose my way.
Plod on, it'll sort out.
By p168 the great cloud of unknowing had descended and suddenly everthing blurred, a cast of thousands of new and unknown names looming out of the murk, more and more of them in an endless stream, and writing in italics which seemed to be going back to the original story, and he was the relative of her and she was the only woman for him and they might be elected Pope and who on earth is Queen Alessandra?
Where did she come from?
Arcalia, the Turk...Wielder of the Enchanted Lance?
Since when?
Now they are all speaking in French, dear god there's no hope.
I'm now in a terrible unholy mess of Medici chaos and confusion with a bit of Fiorentina thrown in, this seems to beat even the most complex of rural Devon families, I must have missed a crucial sentence.
Perhaps one of those 12,103 people who have bought the book could help me through?
There's really only one thing for it, go back to the foot of Pork Hill and drive up again.
I'm feeling really stupid, fancy not bringing a compass and a flask of soup.