Filming: a Love Story Tabish Khair Picador, 399pp, £16.99 ISBN 0330419226

Tabish Khair's languidly compelling debut novel, The Bus Stopped, took as a metaphor for the complex nation of India an ordinary commercial bus, filled with a cross-section of Indians from different castes. Khair's second novel, Filming, also focuses on social conflict, but is set within a broader historical context. The desires of a group of varied characters are played out against the backdrop of the turbulent decades leading to partition and independence.

Khair's unifying metaphor this time round, as one might guess from the title, is film. Films mimic reality just as our dreaming does during sleep. Khair's concern is what happens when you make a conscious decision to follow your dreams. Your dream may, or invariably will, conflict with someone else's, even when the apparent dream is "shared". This theory is neatly highlighted in the novel's backdrop of Hindus against Muslims dreaming of "their" land, "their" future. Achieving a dream, Khair proposes, will always somehow involve sacrifice.

His narrative is multi-layered. In 1989, a PhD scholar of old Bombay films (from the 1940s; "Bollywood" is a more modern term) travels to Denmark to interview an elderly expat Muslim scriptwriter known as Batin. Batin appears to know an awful lot about the events surrounding the Rajkunwar Studio (motto: "where dreams come alive"), which, on the same night Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated, is set alight by Hindu fundamentalists, (possibly) killing all those inside: Hari and Rajkunwar (the studio owners), Bhuvaneshwari (Hari's wife and studio "queen bee"), Saleem Lahori (a silent-era actor who is in love with Bhuvaneshwari) and two orphaned children.

The scholar also interviews a female doctor about childhood memories of seeing a film, one her father, Ashok, had always avoided seeing. Made by the Rajkunwar Studio, this film told the story of a "real-life love triangle". Ashok's secret is that he was the son of Durga, a prostitute who ran away with one of her clients, Harihar, to travel with him around villages showing films on a rudimentary projector. Together, but with varying degrees of denial, betrayal and ignorance, Durga and Harihar left their son to be raised and educated by a wealthy woman, and headed for Bombay with the woman's brother Chotte; once there, all three changed their identities to pursue their dreams.

Underpinning this intriguing novel is a concern for the truth. How can you, Khair argues, understand your own truth when so much remains hidden from consciousness? Durga, for instance, believes she has given Ashok away so that he may have a better life. This belief is compromised by her growing attachment to Chotte, and her recurrent dream for "a home" rather than a life on the road.

Stories, like dreams, like people, are impossible to fence in. The feel of Khair's prose is of conflicting tales straining at the leash to be contained within the dust-jacket; any one strand of the narrative could have veered off to become the rest of the novel to good effect. In keeping with this idea of dreams, truth and shadows, Khair plays games with chronology and revealed material. I was less convinced by this mystery element of the narrative. It felt contrived and needlessly complicated, since it's easy to work out early on who the Muslim-in-exile really is, or who Ashok's parents have become.

But it is in keeping with Khair's pertinent and thought-provoking musings on self-deception. Khair's skill lies in making us question our own assumptions about what we do and why we do it - given that our consciousness is at times at war with our subconscious, just as India was for a time at war with itself. Khair warns us of the perils of self-justification borne of partial self-knowledge. Given our capacity for self-delusion, can we cope, this novel asks, when our dreams come true?

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