Women writers, eh? Madeline Miller's the Song of Achilles: An unworthy Orange Prize winner?

Drew Ratter writes:

I think a reasonable question to ask is: Why? 

I just finished reading The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller. It took me quite a while, because I was reading a lot of other stuff while I picked it up and put it down. I always read like that, of course, three or four books at a time, and sometimes there will be one which gets forgotten and lost completely, and never finished. 

Actually, that happens more with the Kindle than it does with physical books. You never trip over the mislaid volume, it just gets further and further from the front of the device.

So the 'why?' can be asked for a number of reasons. Why did I finish it? It was quite early on that I realised that it was a rather overblown, vulgar piece of work. That the characters were quite two dimensional. 

And then: Why did the author think that the best way to resolve every situation she got her characters into was to bring on the supernatural? It is pretty well never the right thing, and an active scrap between Achilles and Scamander, the river god with his mighty bludgeon is, in addition, absurd.

His mother, of course, is a sea-nymph, and hence divine. And she doesn't like Patroclus, his love, in life, and eventually in death.

No answer comes. Supernatural solutions are just an easy way to resolution, without all the bother of actually solving the situation through, well, either straightforward narrative development. Or indeed some of the more tricksy kind. The gods did it.

The other 'why?' might be: 

Why did this fairly mediocre piece of work win the 2012 Orange Prize (for fiction written by a woman)? How does that reflect on the Orange Prize? Kathryn Hughes, biographer of the immensely great George Eliot, said she was sure Eliot would never have allowed on of her  books into a gender specific competition. Neither Nadime Gordimer nor A S Byatt allow their works to be put forward.

At the same time, the most utterly remarkable of contemporary English novelists, Hilary Mantel, is up for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction, privately sponsored this year and no longer Orange, and if she wins it will not only be deserved but an enormous vote of confidence in the awards.. Of course, she wins pretty well anything and everything she is entered for at present, after years of being paid little attention to. 

Maybe that says more about prizes, fads, fashions and judges than it does about writers. And given how many writers with real ability don't get either recognition or money, I suppose, the more the merrier.

But I can't see that the winner of 2012's Orange Prize remotely represents the best fiction written by a woman in that year.  Or a man.