The Disaster Tourist

THE DISASTER TOURIST is a new book in the climate fiction subgenre. This dark satire looks at workplace harassment, feminism, and disaster profiteering. The word “manufactured” sticks with me as a central theme, and not in the obvious way of being fake or unrealistic; I'm referring to the societal tendency to influence the future with our past and current actions. Mentally this book felt like it had three distinct phases, each one unraveling further.

Content warnings: sexual harassment.

Thank you to NetGalley and Counterpoint Press for the digital ARC and opportunity to review early.

Bong Joon-ho adaptation when???

Without giving too much away, this gave me the same feelings I had when reading The Man Who Was Tuesday by G.K. Chesterton. Its critiques are sharp, its beats are  thrilling, and it has the conviction to keep following the premise to the bitter end. I loved every minute, and genuinely would love to see an adaptation. Initially I thought it might be more in the wheelhouse of Park Chan-wook, but by the end it's Bong-ho or bust.

Amazing...

Some things one needs to know here.
In Korea a 30+ female employee is “old news”. She can't really get a new job, and everyone assumes she's going to get married if she quits. Quitting a job is basically a suicide. Especially if you quit like Yona did. The company wanted to get rid of her, and was just squeezing the rest of her out before throwing her out, so she wouldn't be getting any good resume either. This is why she was in such a horrible position.
But, she submitted her resignation letter. Her work had become insufferable.
She was accepting the trip, not as a possibility to keep her job, but as some sort of compensation for the bullying and harassment the company had put her through.
So, she chose the most expensive trip.

Frankly, I'm not sure if she died or not...

Quite a unique, short and seemingly light-weight novel that packs quite some heavy subjects. In a world that's probably just a tiny bit ahead of us, disaster tourism flourishes. Eager tourists flock to special destinations to glimpse (and occasionally also volunteer, if they are early enough) at sites where tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes have devastated human lives. These travel packages feed on their guests's fascination with tragedy and invoke in them a new gratitude for their own lives. The heroine in this novel works for the company planning the travel packages. Now she's stranded at one of the disaster sites, and suddenly gets to witness how that tourism has transformed the life of the local inhabitants.

Fast-paced and entertaining. Speculative, and close to satire, which was appreciated considering the gloomy picture of humanity at its heart.

3.5

Man this was a trip.

Yona Kim works for a Korean company called Jungle that curates inclusive holiday packages to disaster zones. She's been there for 10 years but is feeling like something has changed, that her position within the organization has subtly shifted. When she is sexually harassed several times by a fellow co-worker, who perhaps senses her diminished standing, we expect a certain type of book. But Yona isn't interested in joining her voice with the victims, with aligning with what she considers the losers. The incident becomes a launching off point to her taking an extended leave to a disaster destination called Mui.

Tribal slaughter to make the tourists shudder and a massive sinkhole - now a wide lake - to excite their imagination. The guests occupy beachfront bungalows with crisp white sheets, rose petals by the bath, a single guest consuming more water than an entire village. They are trundled out to witness the poverty of the locals with a scheduled day for altruistic labour in digging a well. But again, Yun Ko-eun has bigger plans than an indictment of Instatravel and white-knighting voluntourism.

Improbably separated from the rest of her tour and left behind, Yona sees what happens in the off season and finds herself having to justify a strange calculus of lives. (Pandemic economics anyone?) A massive, faceless corporation named Paul that despite it's humanizing name seems inevitable in its forward progress of business, widely distributed across thousands of people that are “just doing their job” harbouring no personal malice or ill will and yet inevitably streamrolling over anything and anyone that gets in their way.

And then, as if unable to support the massive weight of so much metaphor it has heaped upon us, The Disaster Tourist veers off into Kaufmanesque territory and embeds a meta lovestory amidst a fabricated disaster. It's a lot. Sacrilege to say but I think this would be even better as a TV serialization. This thing reads like a tight one season story arc filled with rich possibility and knowing winks. This thing could become even more scathing, hilarious and plaintive if given some real space to breathe.

I really enjoyed this. A woman who works for a disaster travel agency gets sent on one of the company's travel packages to review it. I went in cold and had no idea what was going to happen and I think that's the best way to approach this. Now, I'm going to hide the rest of this review so I can get some thoughts out in a way that doesn't cause spoilers.
I was hooked right away with the opening bit about Yona Kim's manager. What a pig! Could you imagine working for a company with other employees protesting abusive behavior in the lobby of the building and no one doing anything about it? I thought the idea of a vacation built around a disaster very interesting (I'm also guilty of this, having planned a trip around a visit to the Lizzie Borden house). When it slowly gets revealed what the manager's secret plan is to upgrade the vacation package for Jungle, I was kind of cheering them on. When I found out they were not just using the "mannequins", I was horrified. What this says about me...I'm scared to know. I wish we had gotten to know Luck a little better, he seemed like a stand up guy, but I have a feeling a lot more was going on there. I like to think that he walked into that mangrove forest and found Yona Kim. Even though Yun Ko-eun told us she was dead. She showed us Yona Kim die. But the lack of body gave me some hope. There's a lot to say about The Disaster Tourist. It would make a great book club pick. Will it make the TOB shortlist? Who knows? It has a total Black Mirror vibe.