Soon after World War II starts in 1939, Mary North leaves finishing school in Switzerland and becomes a teacher in London.

Initially, the war seems like a lark for this 18-year-old upper-class girl, who, despite her mother’s wishes, is not ready to marry a suitably affluent husband. Instead, her first task is to send children out to the countryside so they are farther away from harm during the conflict.

Assertive and witty, Mary North eventually persuades the father of one of her pupils to retrieve his African-American son from the country. When Zachary returns home to London, he is so badly starved that he needs to be hospitalized for a week.

Mary North is the conscience of the novel “Everyone Brave Is Forgiven” by British author Chris Cleave, whose earlier fiction includes “Incendiary” and “Little Bee.” Wartime letters exchanged by the author’s grandfather, who survived the almost constant bombing of the island of Malta, and his grandmother, who was back in England, inspired the author, but it is not a portrayal of his relatives.

Darkness and deprivation are the backdrops of this story, and even the romances are tinged with lots of sadness. Mary North strikes up a romance with Tom Shaw, who tells her to stop worrying so much about her students’ well-being and stick to teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic.

“What good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?” she retorts.

It’s hard to imagine any new World War II novel counting for much, especially for readers, including myself, who were mesmerized by “All the Light We Cannot See,” Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, also set during World War II.

“Everyone Brave Is Forgiven” features a fine caricature of a British sergeant who yells loudly and constantly as he drills his men during bayonet practice. If you can picture the actor John Cleese playing the British sergeant in a movie version, you may laugh.

Mr. Cleave is especially skilled at writing dialogue packed with smart banter, withering insults and the understated humor for which the English are justly famous.

Alistair Heath, an art conservator who worked at the Tate Museum, is stationed on the island of Malta, where he keeps up a regular repartee with Maj. Simonson. By novel’s end, their bond grows more brotherly.

From Malta, Heath writes letters to Mary North, whom he meets once while on leave. At first, their correspondence is restrained but grows more lighthearted.

The author’s sentences are redolent of Charles Dickens. Here are the aromas Mary North experiences:

“London closed around her with its smell of coal smoke and truck exhaust and Tube ventings and railway grease and frying and horse droppings and wet masonry and exhaled cigarettes and damp worsted overcoats and quick brown water coursing in the gutters and slow brown water infusing with disintegrating newsprint in the puddles, along with the flotilla of butts already smoked.”

Ultimately, this is a story about people who try to hold on to their humanity and maintain a shred of normalcy even as they witness unspeakable gore and lose their limbs or people they love.

The least satisfying aspect of this novel is its characters because most of the time they seem like admirable archetypes rather than actual human beings. But their wit, which preserved their sanity, is enviable.

Maj. Simonson utters the story’s funniest line as he recounts the invaders welcomed by residents of Malta.

“They’ve been hospitable to the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Christians and the French. If Mussolini had got here five minutes before us, the locals would be whistling Puccini.”

Marylynne Pitz: mpitz@post-gazette.com; 412-263-1648 or Twitter: @mpitzpg.

First Published: June 5, 2016, 4:00 a.m.