Book Review – The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
Hot on the heels of my last book review here comes another!
The Disaster Tourist by Korean autjor Yun Ko-eun tells the story of Yona, who’s worked for Seoul-based travel company Jungle for 10 years, offering package holidays to destinations in disaster zones.
When she tries to quit after a #MeToo incident, her boss tries to buy her silence with a free trip to Mui, a remote Vietnamese island home to one of the company’s least popular disaster tours. In return, all she needs to provide is a full report on how to improve the itinerary.
To begin with, all seems okay. She joins 5 other people on the trip and has a bit of an adventure out to see some volcanoes. But things start hotting up when she becomes trapped on the island and begins to figure out what is happening around her – a tale of surreal conspiracy and powerful corporate entities plotting to stage a plausible disaster.
First published in Korean in 2013 but translated into English in 2020 by Lizzie Buehler sometimes it feels like the characters are a bit thin; we hear nothing of Yona’s life outside of work and her love story comes across as just lukewarm. Of course, as an emergency manager, I also naturally took issue at the use of ‘natural disaster’ throughout (see here for why natural disasters don’t exist).
There were also sections of the book, later in the story, which I found myself reflecting on in ways other readers perhaps wouldn’t. As emergency managers we develop similar stories for training exercises, and the faceless/nameless identities of the characters in those exercises seemed all too familiar whilst reading this.
It’s a short book at just 180 or so pages. I read it to a background of TV news showing Hurricane Ida making landfall in Louisianna, which seemed especially resonant. As Yona herself contemplates “disaster lays dormant in every corner, like depression. You never knew when it might spring into terrible action”.
The Disaster Tourist is thought-provoking throughout (especially as an emergency manager) but I suspect it takes on a slightly different relevance for everyone now contemplating post-pandemic travel.
And finally, it’s unlikely that other readers would draw a similar parallels, but this section seemed prophetic having been written in 2013…
