One of the criticisms most frequently levelled at the Booker prize is that its selections are generally dull. Not bad, just, y'know... As William Gass said of the Pulitzer Prize - and as he was quoted on a blog on this site by a poster called piersj: "It takes dead aim at mediocrity and rarely misses."

I don't think this criticism is entirely fair. Firstly because the problem can be blamed as much on the range of books available as on the people compiling the long and shortlists. Secondly, because the prize sometimes goes to very special books anyway. What's more the wonderful strangeness of Darkmans - the first contender I read - should be enough to give any naysayer pause.

If, however, our cynical Booker disparagers were to pick up The Welsh Girl instead, they might feel vindicated. It ranks among the more lumpen Bookertariat: mostly inoffensive, but hardly interesting - except perhaps as the first novel of talented writer who should go on to better things.

Centred on a small nationalist village in Snowdonia that has become the site of a prisoner of war camp at the tail end of the second world war, the novel has three main strands. The first relates to Esther, a girl who Davies repeatedly tells us is a tough, practical farmer's daughter, but who spends a lot of the novel in tears and in subjugation to the men around her. This male domination manifests most unpleasantly when she is raped by a soldier working at the camp; a rape that, following the standard novelistic convention, makes her pregnant.

The second strand follows Karsten, a thoughtful and compassionate German, who becomes a PoW and must come to terms with the fact of surrender. Finally, there's a quest for identity undertaken by the refugee son of a German Jewish father who helps the British war effort by interviewing German prisoners, one of whom is Rudolph Hess.

The prose is lucid and elegant, the dialogue engaging and in spite of a slightly irritating use of the historic present whenever Esther is on the scene, the storytelling is smooth. There's no hardship in reading The Welsh Girl. Indeed, my main complaint is that Peter Ho Davies tries to make it too easy, laboriously spelling out every theme and idea as if he doesn't credit his readers with enough intelligence to work things out for themselves.

You can probably predict from my brief précis alone that one of the main themes in the book relates to shame, centring around Karsten's surrender and Esther's forced pregnancy. Even so, it's spelt out again and again, awkwardly, in Esther's internal soliloquies, Karsten's frequent musing on the subject, interjections from the narrator... Davies forces "dishonour" down our throats like a well-intentioned, but hopelessly patronising schoolmaster.

This enthusiasm for over explanation also extends to the book's imagery, a good example coming in one of its most visually arresting passages where Esther and her father are delivering lambs. One is stillborn, another's mother dies after producing it. The old farmer skins the dead lamb and places the fleece on the live animal, so that the surviving ewe scents her own baby on it and allows it to suckle. The similarities with deceptions Esther has to make about the source of her own unborn baby are clear - but just in case we haven't grasped it Davies clomps in with an explanation: "Esther's tired mind can barely make sense of the parallels. Has she deceived or been deceived? Is she the lamb, the ewe, the shepherd?"

The Welsh Girl's narrative is hardly challenging either. The unwanted pregnancy, the tensions around Welsh nationalism in war time and the internal conflicts of German prisoners as they come to realise what they were fighting for are all very familiar territory and it feels as if almost every step of the story has been previously trodden (up until the pleasingly inconclusive ending, at least). Of course, there's nothing wrong with revisiting familiar territory, but the clunking predictability with which each cliché unfolds may make impatient readers wonder why they're bothering to read through a story whose ending is immediately clear.

I should note here that it would be untrue and unfair to say that the book contains nothing original - but even when there are unexpected developments they're generally unconvincing. An especially daft scene sees Rudolph Hess taking on a bull, the old deputy leader of the Nazi party putting himself into the path of the charging beast, wielding only a red scarf that, rather too coincidentally, he had been wearing.

All this clumsiness comes as a surprise from a writer with a reputation as good as Peter Ho Davies, one of the most visibly and frequently acclaimed of the latest batch of Granta's best young British writers thanks to collections of short stories that have been labelled as "breathtaking" and "subtle". It's also surprising given how competent his writing is over the general course of Welsh Girl. There's plenty of indication that one day he may write a fascinating book. This one isn't it, however, and if it does take the prize it will confirm the Booker critics in their cynicism.

Or, am I missing something? If you disagree, do let me know.

Meanwhile, if you haven't read The Welsh Girl and want to join in next time, start tucking into Edward Docx's Self Help. I'll be blogging on it here soon.