Book Review: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
Want to know whether to read The Disaster Tourist? Well, this The Disaster Tourist review should help you decide!
Disclosure: I participated in an Instagram campaign for The Disaster Tourist and was provided a copy of the book by the publisher. However, I was under no obligation to share a blog post or review and all opinions are my own.
The Disaster Tourist Summary
Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui.
She accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.
The Disaster Tourist Review
Coming in at just under 200 pages, The Disaster Tourist is a short novel but it packs a punch. With themes about climate change, dark tourism, accountability and power, the author touches upon plenty of serious issues here.
The novel’s protagonist is a thirty-something Korean woman named Yona. She works for a disaster tourism company called “Jungle” that organises trips to disaster zones e.g. places ravaged by tsunamis.
She doesn’t have much else in her life at work so when she is sexually harassed by her boss one day, something that supposedly only happens when you’re on the way out, it makes her question what she’s doing in life and she also becomes concerned her job.
Instead of speaking out against her supervisor, she takes his advice to go on a short break to clear her head. He offers her a place as a tourist on one of the companies very own trips and asks that she assess whether the trip should continue to be offered.
Yona packs her bags and heads off to the island of Mui in South East Asia. This is a disaster tourist location because there is a giant sinkhole on the island that has a sinister backstory.
Through Yona’s business trip, the author questions our general obsession and morbid fascination with disasters, and to what extent each individual has any sort of culpability in morally dubious activities, such as dark/disaster tourism.
The first half of the novel is a little slow and I found myself wondering why this had been named a “thriller” of sorts but this became quickly apparent in the fast-paced second half.
From about the mid-way point, Yona’s circumstances dramatically change and the story becomes much more sinister. Suddenly something that was simply questionable becomes really dark.
It’s very topical in that it deals with natural disasters which are coming more and more prevalent in the world today because of global warming. It’s a sort of warning to readers and to mankind that we don’t control nature, nature is in control and should be respected.
One thing to note is that I think the description of this book as “engaging with the #MeToo movement” is a bit of a stretch, to be honest. I say this because whilst the novel does touch upon sexual harassment in the workplace, it doesn’t offer much analysis of this incident.
Sure, the author shares an account of sexual harassment, one that is familiar to many women in Korea and all over the globe, but it doesn’t go much further than that.
Indeed, the novel was written before the #MeToo movement even really began to occupy headlines. Whilst an English translation was published in 2020, the original Korean text was published in 2013.
The author herself said in an interview that it was less about the fact that Yona is a woman and Kim is a man but rather about how people in positions of authority can abuse those powers more generally. She wanted to show how entrenched workplace abuse of power can be but it doesn’t offer a solution.
If you’re interested in themes to do with dark tourism, the impact of it upon native dwellers, as well as abuse of power and culpability within organisations that create these kinds of morally dubious experiences. Then I think you’ll enjoy this.
All in all, this is a great short eco-thriller with some good twists towards the end that I certainly didn’t see coming and found quite shocking and at the end, you’ll find that head will be full of questions and not just about the story itself but about what it says about us and society today.
Buy The Disaster Tourist Now:
Amazon | Bookshop.org
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If you want to check out the book about Korean books in translation that I made in collaboration with Serpent’s Tail and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea then click play below!
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